


The Geneva Heist

by anamatics



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Bank Robbery, Crimes & Criminals, F/F, Gen, Organized Crime
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-02-11 19:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 46,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2080485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The terms of Moriarty’s deal did not change following the Kayden Fuller Incident, if anything, they grew more lax.   And every day the newspaper came.</p><p>She was free for all of four hours, but those four hours were enough to get the point across to her people.  Three emails at an internet café they never even knew she visited.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prelude

Once, a little bird had whispered a fascinating tidbit of information in her ear. 

It was early morning, the sun barely over the horizon and casting weak rays of pale light across the crisp white bedspread that was half falling off the bed.  Jamie was half asleep, sex warm and mind-sluggish with the early hour.  Beside her, a woman with olive-colored skin and riotous, dark brown curls was curled onto her side.  She was pressed, shoulder to well-muscled thigh against Jamie’s side, soft snores of post-coital sleep escaping her parted lips. 

Jamie stared up at the ceiling, at the cracked surface and the ancient-looking molding as light started to creep into the window.  Last night had been a miscalculation, an overstepping of a personal rule so newly in place that she hated herself for even recalling _why_ such a rule needed to exist at all. 

He’s gone to New York now, mocking her with his sobriety.  He dangled her failure to see her plan through to the end.  He should be dead in a back alley, overdose jammed into his arm and no longer able to torment her heart.

(She cannot love, she _cannot_. She had to die in order to be free of him and all he makes her feel.)

“I see the people who walk into our vault, day after day.” The woman’s name was Clémence D’Ory.  She worked as a receptionist for one of the largest privately held banks in the city, watching the daily comings and goings of the bank’s many important clients. Jamie had happened upon her quite by chance, which is to say entirely on purpose. Her name had come up in connection to something else, someone else.  They’d since broken up, but Clémence had not outlived her usefulness. 

“I know what they hide away, deep in our vault.”

Jamie leaned in, fingers splayed out on the rim of her wine glass.  “What do they hide, darling?” She purred the words into Clémence’s ear, breath hot and implication heavy on her tongue.  She’d wanted to know because little birds with eyes that see such secrets usually lacked the lips to tell them.  “What secrets do they keep buried deep under the earth?”

“You’ve a way with words,” Clémence said.  She didn’t pull away, Jamie’s lips widened into a broad smile.  She refused to let it show in her eyes, such smiles were not for people like Clémence, not for people who meant nothing. 

“I do try.”

Clémence’s smile was conspiratorial.  “I’ve seen things, when I take the clients down there, they’re important men, you know.”  Jamie did know, and she nodded her agreement and continued interest politely because this conversation was starting to grow stale.  She would pry the information out of this woman bit by bit, but this was the easier option.  Clémence was beautiful, not stunning, but certainly beautiful; Jamie would hate to have to injure her over something as petty as a secret she was going to tell anyway. 

Jamie sipped her wine.  “What sort of things?”

“Photographs, tapes – the little kind from tape recorders and older, regular, cassettes too; files and data keys.  There are so many documents, I swear, half the time I take them down to the vault it’s just to ascertain that their things are still down there. Hard copies of the proof to all those rumors in the papers…” Clémence gives a little shrug. “You know?”

“I do.”

It was easy to take her home, to kiss her until Jamie was able to forget the nagging pain of a wound she refused to admit was still weeping. It was easy to press her lips into skin that was soft and fragrant, instead of hard and angular.  There were no marks on this woman, not like _his_ skin, not like her own.  This woman was flawed, but her flaws were in the weakness of her mind, not the lines of her body.  Jamie could have her; she could fuck her until she couldn’t remember anything else.

The sun dawned weak and hazy.  Clouds danced across the sky, caught between the warm reds and yellows of sunrise and dark grey, heavy with the rain that would come later. Jamie had her answer; the plan was already forming in her mind.  This would be her coup de grace, her greatest achievement.  She could control an entire country with the knowledge contained in that underground vault.  All she had to do was get Clémence D’Ory to tell her where to look.

 

A month later, Jamie had carried a folio of her medical records and a sachet of her mother’s jewelry into the lobby of the bank.  She stood where she would be caught on camera, her skin crawling as she did so. It was not her nature to be seen, to allow herself to be caught.  It was not her nature to act.  Yet she was enjoying this, the flirtation with Clémence over the counter, the pretty way she laughed when Jamie leaned over to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.   Clémence was easy, and the sex was good.  The sex helped Jamie to forget the rule that she was breaking, for the sex had a goal in mind.  

Her medical records should have been burned, all traces of them erased along with the doctor who’d dared tell Jamie of the melanoma growing on her back. Jamie had killed him, once he’d removed the growth and confirmed its cancerous nature.  He wasn’t one of her doctors, a specialist she’d been referred to, and his death was a reaction to the infallible truth that Jamie was only human and not the superior being she liked to think herself to be.

Perhaps it was vanity that made her keep them, proof that she’d beaten something that could have killed her. 

She procured a box, and let Clémence lead her down the three spiral staircases to the vault.  Clémence’s eyes were dark, intense under her curls, and Jamie wanted her then and there, over the low table of the vault.  She kept her hands on her folio and the pen tucked inside: ultraviolet ink. 

“None of our vaults are numbered,” Clémence explained.  She picked up the pen and crossed to the far wall.  There was something wicked about watching this woman, this woman Jamie had so expertly needled and pushed to the point where she would do this willingly.  “You must know what you’re looking for or else you will never decipher the code.”

There were no cameras in the vault.  Jamie was told that by the account representative she’d spoken to a week ago.  He had taken one look at her mother’s diamonds and the money that Jamie wanted to deposit and his eyes went almost black with glee.  She was old money; her mother’s name still meant something in some circles, despite Jamie’s efforts to erase its meaning.  “No one will ever know what you store within our vault.  We pride ourselves on secrecy, ma’am.” 

Clémence marked the boxes seemingly at random, her high stilettos taping out a staccato rhythm on the granite floor of the vault as she moved about the room.  Jamie watched her, fingers curled around her folio.  She stood as still as a statue, only her breath and the fall of her hair across her cheek the indication that she was indeed alive at all.

She was going to miss the sex. 

Clémence, after all, was due for an accident.

 

Jamie got caught up on the whisperings she heard about Macedonia, another plan trickled its way into place at the back of her mind in short order.  She was careful about this one, oh, so careful. It had to be in New York, and that irritated her, because it brought her too close to Sherlock.  Too close to all the rules she could not stand to break.

The robbery, the idea of seizing control of an entire country through blackmail alone, fell by the wayside.  Jamie watched, she waited.  She saw Sherlock for who he had become.  Saw him claw his way back out of a needle, saw him turn himself around.

(Saw him make a _friend._ What else could she be?  He obviously wasn’t interested in sleeping with her. Jamie wanted to know more, so she settled in, she bided her time. Minute by minute, hour by hour, until her plan of action was just that: another thread in her endless web.)

She watched him from the shadows as he nearly killed Sebastian.  It was too much, she’d always liked Sebastian.  He had Jamie’s sense of the dramatic, at times, and he never questioned her authority. 

It wasn’t until much later, when everything had been blown to pieces by a small woman with dark hair and intense eyes who Jamie had sorely underestimated, that she found herself thinking of that half-planned heist once more. 

She had, after all, a great deal of time on her hands now. 

-

Devon Gaspar’s betrayal had not been one that she’d foreseen, but it was a symptom of perhaps a more endemic problem.  She was locked away, and could not maintain the tight control of her organization that she had once so enjoyed.  The call had come in the _Ledger_ , in the usual way, a kidnapping of a girl she’d tricked herself into forgetting about.

(A girl she could never forget.)

If her jailor noticed the slight stiffening of her shoulders, he said nothing, speaking quietly on into his mobile on the far side of the room.  Something would happen soon.  A welcome break in the monotony of this place.

How Devon had even known of the girl’s existence was another, perhaps more troubling matter.  It sent Jamie into a spiral of thought, contemplating the girl’s father and how best she was going to stop him from spilling all of her secrets from this prison.  The rules, after all, were very strict.  She’d negotiated for amenities, as was her right, and slowly her secrets were bartered away until she felt stripped bare and rubbed raw by all that they had taken from her.  All for paints, and the newspaper, her letters to Sherlock, it somehow seemed an unfair trade.

Twenty minutes later after she’d read the demand, Sherlock Holmes walked into her prison, Joan Watson on his heels.  Jamie had not yet thought of a course of action, and when one had presented itself so prettily, she was not about to say no.

 

It was part of the plan, all along, that she would leave the prison of her own volition.  “Come see me in a year,” she said to Watson.  She wanted to see Watson, to see her socially, to understand her, to have her if she could.  It was not often that Jamie was bested, a wound that festered at the back of her mind, eating away at her concentration and rendering her useless.

She’d be released, or she would leave.

And she would have Joan Watson.

 

Left with naught but her mind and her ever-present jailor, Jamie’s mind had drifted away from the white-hot rage she felt at being bested by one she’d determined to be so unremarkable and back to Clémence D’Ory.  She had been beautiful, even in death, sprawled out in a back alleyway, her jewelry stripped from her body and her purse in a dumpster a few blocks away.  Jamie had done it herself, had her up against the dirty alley wall, pretending to be wine-drunk and amorous.  Clémence had never seen the gun coming; she’d never so much as felt it before the bullet had buried itself between her eyes.

Ramses Matoo, her jailor, was a smart man.  Jamie liked that about him.  They thought his homosexual tendencies would protect him from her charms, and he resisted well. But sex was not the only way to get people to do her bidding, it just happened to be how she’d chosen to study Sherlock Holmes.  Really, she wouldn’t go around sleeping with just anyone.  She had _standards_ , and a gay man with a loving husband was not high on her list of conquests. 

“Tell me something,” she asked, one day not long before Devon’s betrayal.  Reports had come in that her organization was slipping.  They’d been months without word from her now, and her control was weakening. 

(She should have seen Devon coming a mile away.)

He’d looked up from the crossword.  “Mn?”  He taps his pen against the folded up newspaper.  It was a daily ritual of theirs.  “1983 Bryan Adams hit, 14 letters. --t----eak----.”

"I was all of two at the time, I wouldn't know."  She'd never cared much for popular music or crossword puzzles.  She had the patience and the knowledge to complete them, but they brought back memories that she would rather forget, faces better left dead and buried.  She turned her attention back to the matter at hand, ignoring her jailor's inattentive supervision and pensive look.  "How would you rob a bank?"

He looked up, all dark skin and pensive eyes.  "You're not serious."

"Call it a thought exercise, Ramses."  Jamie tilted her head to one side, all blank smile and feeling brittle.

"I suppose I'd just walk in and point my gun at the teller."  He clicked the top of his pen, pushing the point down and up again. Jamie felt a surge of irritation at the back of her neck and had to bite down hard on the inside of her cheek to resist the urge to get to her feet and stab him in the eye with the pen.  Blood filled her mouth.  She relished the coppery taste.  "What about you?"

"How would I go about it?"

"Yes."

"I suppose I've never thought about it particularly."  Jamie affected a shrug.  "I would like to think that I'd be more discrete than robbery at gunpoint."

He regarded her for a long time before turning his attention back to his crossword.  He clicked the pen again.

Jamie's finger twitched. "Cuts like a knife, that's your answer."

 

As much as Jamie hated to admit it, her control was slipping.  She was trapped by the limitations of her prison, by what she could say to her lawyers in layer upon layer of coded instruction.  Her people were never fully under her control, and she was never fool enough to think that they were.

Devon would be an example, and the job in Geneva would be her coup de grace.

Pity that Agent Matoo would be caught in the crossfire, Jamie had always liked him.

 

 

Her mind was swimming as she slipped onto a public computer at one of the few Internet cafes that remained in the city.  She could function still, but it was a challenge to keep her focus.  The glass had cut too deeply.  She was going to need stitches.

Three short emails from an anonymous account and she was gone, wrists screaming with the effort that it had taken to type.  She had to play the hero now, and it wasn't a hat she wore well.

The girl child had wide eyes that reminded Jamie far too much of her younger brother.  She saw the gun in Jamie's hand and swallowed, but her jaw was set resolute and she was not afraid.  Jamie stared at her, in awe of this creature that she had created and allowed to live in a moment of vanity where she fancied herself in love.  The child she could never love.

"Go down the stairs and out the door you find there."  Jamie pointed back the way she'd come.  They were all dead but Devon Gaspar now, and he wasn't going to be in any position to chase her.  "There is a car waiting to take you back to your mother."

"Who are you?"

"No one."

"You're obviously someone."  Christ, was she ever this talkative?

"It doesn't matter."

She would have never named this child Kayden.

The girl looked over her shoulder just once and then she was gone, fingers brushing against Jamie's side as she disappeared down the stairs.

 

Devon Gaspar's father was a Royal Marine, he was a middle-aged man with too much ambition and not nearly enough sense.  Jamie relished taking his father's pen knife and plunging it into his neck.  She did not simply cut, no that would be too good for him.  She hacked and clawed until there was nothing left of his neck but a gaping bloody mess.  "You should have known better, Devon," she told him, watching as he choked and spluttered, blood leaking over her boots.  She scowled, knife hanging limply from one hand.  She hadn't meant to get dirty.  Pity.

The world tilted then and she could not stand up any more.  Too much blood, she'd miscalculated, cut too deep.

Sherlock found her there, and Jamie wished it had been Watson.  She wanted Watson to see what she'd done for this child that she should not have cared for.  She had liked Devon, trusted him more than many others.  She told Sherlock the truth of the matter, and hoped he'd have the good sense to listen.

 

 

Her plan worked, the news was in the paper not a week later.  A list of names, a crew for the job.  A date in six months, the target date.  It set Jamie's mind racing with possibilities; they would release her before that date.  And she would play the victim.

Her lips quirked upwards, a smile she hadn't foreseen quick enough to mask it.  Joan Watson would help her, if she asked.  Jamie was sure of that.

"Why are you smiling?" His neck still black and blue, Ramses Matoo sat across from her in the warehouse prison.  Jamie admired his dedication. In another life, she would have targeted him for her organization.  He would rise up the ranks quickly.  Pity he was such a do-gooder.

"Painkillers."

"In the baseball box scores?"

"The Mets lost 19-3, it was amusing."

"You don't follow sports."

Scowling, Jamie turned the page in the paper.  He was far too sharp for his own good.  Next time she'd have to make sure she finished the job. "A girl must have some secrets, Agent Matoo."

He inclined his head to one side and let it drop.


	2. i

They moved in silence. Their shovels dug deep underneath the street outside of their target.  For months they carved their path into the very earth below the busy street.  Their permits stated that they were investigating some interference by the sewer lines with the fiber optic cables laid not twenty years before, beneath the bank.  It was a good cover, one that checked out when they were questioned by the gendarmerie of the cantonal police.

The whole team was poised on a knife's edge. 

Assembled for their skills, but also for their ability to work as a unit, they came from all over the world.  Their employer preferred the collaborative effort, when at all possible.  They were anxious, worried.  This had to go off without a hitch.  They all knew what happened to Devon Gaspar, what their employer had done to the Judas in their midst.  The terror that they felt at what had been done while their employer was still in prison - a prison even the long reach of the organization could not reach - was an ever-present companion.  It lurked in the shadows beneath their dig, never letting them forget the battered remains of the corpse, sent from Gaspar's own mobile, a warning not to cross her.

They were cautious, perhaps overly so, speaking only in German in a city that largely spoke French.  Guest workers, they called themselves, contracted by the city to do a job no one had wanted.  It was a lie, but it was a good one that could be believed easily.

The heist was to take place at the weekend, a sleepy Sunday morning in late June.  The temperature had climbed to an uncharacteristic twenty-five degrees and the men were sweating as they set about to begin their day's work.  The few people that were awake as down broke over the lake in the distance were on their way to mass, choir singers and altar boys.  The crew was able to dodge them easily - their quarry was near no churches.

They moved fluidly, setting up their road blocks and cutting off the street. Their papers said that they were set to finish their project today. Collecting supplies and double checking their work.

The charges were laid, deep in the hole in the ground, and a hole was blasted through the wall that they'd uncovered.  It cleaved its way through the final six inches of steel and rubble in a final blow that corresponded with the hour tolling seven from every belfry in the city.

The appointed leader was a gruff man, tall and broad.  Stooping through the hole in the floor was challenging with his large frame.  He righted himself slowly, tugging on gloves and already sticky with sweat under his tactical gear.  It had been close to a year since the clues were left.  The instruction had been concise, strict.

_Failure to follow my instructions would have desperate consequences, William.  Perhaps I'll pay a visit to your wife.  I'm sure she would be very interested to know what you did to her lover in Cairo a year ago June._

William Roscoe swallowed, his face hardening.  He pulled flashlight with a black light bulb from his pocket and a marker.  "Let's go," he said grimly, stepping forward to the first bank of safety deposit boxes.

The fluidity at which they moved was practiced, honed from hours of working as a group.  Each member of the team had their own charged task.  Roscoe found the boxes, retracing the steps of someone months before, looking for faded traces of ultraviolet ink on the slate-colored boxes.  His light found the first quarry quickly.  "Mathieu," he hissed, tapping it and drawing a line in black marker.  "First one."

"Okay," Mathieu’s accented voice replied.  He was the best with locks, arguably one of the best in the world. Safes were his specialty.  He pulled his picks from the cargo pocket of his pants and got to work.

Sweat dripped down Roscoe's brow as he identified the boxes.  There were thirty five in total.  He was not from Geneva, or even Switzerland, but he knew what he was seeing as Mathieu got the first box open.  He passed its contents to Brusseau, who together with Rodriguez, would start to funnel them into envelopes that they'd kept.

The last box was far to the back of the room, close to the door that would lead to a stairway up and into the bank.  He drew his line carefully and turned, Mathieu half a step behind him, picks in hand.

"Get that one and then help me erase the marks." From his back pocket he pulled a small bottle of stain remover and a wad of towels.  He turned, intent to work his way back, when Mathieu let out a surprised noise.  The box was open before him, and a small bag of jewelry had fallen open into his lap.  He gathered the tangled mess of necklaces and baubles into his hands and shoved them back into their container.

"What are you doing?" Roscoe hissed.

"Look."  Mathieu flipped open the folder that had been locked inside the box. His eyes were wide, fingers trailing over real names, numbers, details that their employer would easily murder for.  "They're medical records."

"We weren't paid to look at this stuff, just to get it."

"But that's the boss!"

Roscoe turned to Mathieu, his hand slamming into his throat.  The smaller man collided with the wall, wincing.  His fingers clawed at Roscoe’s large hand his feet sliding on the slick floor of the vault. Roscoe squeezed the man’s neck, his eyes narrowed slits in the dim light.  "No," he growled, "It is not."

"Five minutes," Rodriguez looked up from her watch. Her hair was falling into her eyes, dark and menacing. She tossed the last of the papers that had slipped from Mathieu’s hand onto the floor into the final envelope.  “We have no time for this.”  She slung the bag over her shoulder.  "Let's get out of here."

Their things are gathered, no traces are left.

 

 

On the other side of the world, the early morning was cool and sticky with humidity.  A lone figure stood out on a widow's walk, leaning against the railing, admiring the south shore surf.  Her silk robe, sloppily tied and slipping off her shoulder, fluttered in the stiff breeze off of the ocean.  Her eyes were on the horizon.  Watching.  Waiting.  Counting down the moments until she would have power anew.

From the pocket of her robe, a low buzzing punctuated the sounds of the sea at early morning.  The woman looked down, raised scar at her wrist stark white in the predawn blackness of the waning night.  It was a shame they were so noticeable, even in this light.  Such was the price of her hubris, she supposed.

The phone felt heavy in her hands as she held it to her ear.  A gentle crackle and static of an international call echoed in the background, a man’s heavy breathing filled the line.  "It's done."

Jamie Moriarty smiled harsh and cruel, fingers catching her hair as it threatened to blow out of the loose bun she'd put it in before coming out onto the rooftop balcony.  "Good."


	3. ii

_"I live no more to shame nor me nor you_

_And you... I wish I didn't feel for you anymore..."_

Even in the city, far, far away from anything that could be considered wilderness, the sounds of summer filled the air.  It was six-thirty in the evening, the city was just starting to cool and Joan Watson was out for a run.

One of the ears of her headphones had stopped working, and she'd tugged them out of her ears in disgust, trotting industriously down the sidewalk, dodging people and listening to the quiet sounds of cicadas and crickets fill the air.  Even in the city.  She had to shake her head.  There was no escaping the sounds of summer, it seemed.

It was a warm evening for late June, the temperature had climbed high that day, but was falling steadily as the sun set.  The pavement was still warm beneath Joan's feet, and though she knew she couldn’t possibly, she liked to think that she could still feel the sun's warmth through her feet as she turned down one street in favor of the slightly longer route back home.

Home was a tiny fourth floor walkup now. It was still close enough to her old residence that Joan did not feel out of sorts running from this new starting point, but it was far enough away that she didn't feel suffocated by the pull of that place and all it had once contained.

Sherlock was off in England, doing something for British Intelligence.  He'd called her once he'd gotten there, asked her to take care of Clyde and to take in the mail until he was able to return.  Joan had agreed to do it, mostly because he'd asked nicely and hadn't just assumed that she'd do it without question.

Joan rounded the final corner and was heading back to her building.  She was half-way to the door when she saw him, leaning against the side of the building beside her door.  Even though her legs were screaming as she approached her fifth mile, she hurried the rest of the way towards the man.  She hadn't seen him in months, since she'd gone to visit him in the hospital following his attack.

She wasn't sure if it was the need to know why he was there, or something more basic.  He had been hurt because of something that they had missed; Moriarty's escape had been by his near-death.  Joan tucked her head down and pushed her screaming, heavy legs forward.  The heat of the day clung to the air, even as night started to fall, and she sweaty and gross and not at all prepared for this meeting and al that it could it entail.

"Agent Matoo."  She was breathless, feet slapping the pavement for the final few steps of her journey. She smiled, breath coming deeply as she straightened up and grinned at him.  "It's been a while."

He smiled pleasantly at her.  "I could say the same to you, Ms. Watson."

She bent, hands on her knees, winded from her final two minute sprint.  "Did you want to come up?"

Agent Matoo shifted, his eyes narrowing.  "That would be preferable." He glanced around and Joan bent to pull her key out of her shoe.  "Isn't that uncomfortable?"

"You don't notice it after a while," Joan replied.  She slipped the key into the lock and lead the US Marshal up the stairs.

 

Twenty minutes and three large glasses of water later, Joan was starting to feel slightly more human.  Agent Matoo was sitting on her couch, seeming unconcerned by her disappearing off into her bedroom for a clean shirt since she couldn't very well shower with him waiting on her.

"What's this about?" she asked, sitting down next to him on the couch, a fourth cup of water in her hands.  The air conditioning came on and Joan leaned forward to scoot a coaster towards herself so she could set her glass down.  "I don't very often get visits from US Marshals."

He pulled a folder out of his briefcase.  "I don't suppose you follow much international news?"

Joan shrugged.  "Not really. It can be depressing, you know?"

"I do."  Agent Matoo opened the folder and set it down in front of them on Joan's coffee table.  He pulled out a pen and clicked the back of it a few times until the tip came out.  Joan's eyes narrowed and she leaned forward to read. An image of a building, obviously somewhere in Europe going off of the architecture alone, was clipped to the top of a sheaf of papers.  "This is Laramie Straus & Co., they are a private Swiss bank that has a... shall we say, rather elite clientele."

Joan frowned. Thanks to her work with Sherlock, she knew many of the major players in Swiss banking, and this was a name that she did not recognize.  "I haven't heard of them."

Agent Matoo inclined his head and clicked his pen again.  Joan clenched her teeth, wishing he’d stop.  "That is by design, Ms. Watson.  Their specialty, beyond the usual Swiss banking fare, is anonymity."

"And?"

"They've been robbed."

"What does a US Marshal have to do with any of this?"

He let out a quiet laugh, a puff of air and a harsh, barking sound.  "I am interested not on my own behalf, Ms. Watson, but rather on behalf of one that used to be in my care."

Joan's eyes narrowed.  Her heart was pounding in her chest now, thinking of what those words meant.  "Used to be?"

"It is amazing what the best lawyers in the world can do, given proper incentive."  Agent Matoo looked down at his hands.  "We simply did not have enough evidence to build a decent case."

"She murdered three men in cold blood and nearly killed you.  After she escaped your prison."

"So she did."

Joan sighed and picked up her glass of water.  "What did she give up?"

"I'm not at liberty to say."

"It must have been a lot for you to let her go."

"I assure you," Agent Matoo's smile was almost cruel. Joan recoiled slightly from him, her fingers tightening around her glass. "It was everything she had."

"And this bank is related to the government's massive error in letting Moriarty leave their clutches how?"

"She had an account there.  Whatever she kept in that bank was stolen Sunday morning at about seven thirty."  Agent Matoo reached for the folder and flipped to the next page.  "It was obviously a well-planned heist and if my contact at Interpol is anything to go by, this is an inside job."

"Why are you telling me about it if Interpol is investigating?"

"I don't want to have to spend any more of time watching over your friend, Joan.  And I worry that when she gets word of this break - that she'll act."

Joan said nothing for a long time, her expression grim.  The clock on the wall in the kitchen ticked loudly, shifting, counting.  Her phone rang quietly where she'd left it on her bedside table.  An ambulance roared by, heading toward the bridge.

"What do you want me to do?"

 

The paper was crumpled in her hand, damp with sweat and curling at the edges.  The ink was smudged from where she'd taken it from Agent Matoo.  "The Hamptons?" She'd been surprised.  It seemed too obvious.  Maybe that was the point.

"She told me she'd always loved the ocean."

 _She's a liar_ , Joan's mind had screamed.  _You can't trust anything she says_.  She'd seen Sherlock battered, crushed and brought to his knees by this woman.  Sherlock, the strongest person she knew.  There was no telling what could come from this request, and Joan had no interest at all of a similar position for herself.

The train whistled behind her and Joan gave an uncomfortable little jump before shaking herself and swinging her leg up onto the bicycle that she'd found on the third floor of the Brownstone in a storage closet on the other side of what had once been her bedroom.  She had never spent much time here, her family was a decidedly lower tax bracket, but the seaside town was beautiful and she was set to go out one of the access roads to the old mid-18th century houses that hadn't been replaced with gaudy rich-people bungalows.

This was going to be a disaster.

 

The house itself was understated.  A widow's walk on the roof that wrapped around a chimney and white shutters on faded blue exterior.  It looked, charming, and not at all what Joan would have expected.

Truth be told, she still didn't really know what to expect.  She didn't anticipate that her arrival would be taken well at all.  Joan leaned the bicycle against the gate and let herself in, hoping that she wasn't about to get shot.

Agent Matoo had wanted her to do this.  "You're the only one she'd listen to, Joan."

"I find that hard to believe," Joan replied.

"She is ... very preoccupied with trying to understand you, surely you must know this.  She would speak to you."

"Yes, serve me up as the one to tell her that one of her most closely-guarded secrets is in the hands of an unknown.  That's going to end well."

"It is my hope that she will be willing to help locate the culprits."

"She isn't a good person.  She doesn't help people."

"She helped Kayden Fuller."

"That's different."

"Is it really?" Agent Matoo really didn’t understand, and Joan wasn’t about to explain to him the perils of narcissism.

The house was oddly welcoming, driving all thoughts of her difficult conversation with Agent Matoo from Joan's mind.  This was the sort of place that Joan would never picture that woman willingly inhabiting.  It was too... she pursed her lips, hand raised to knock on the door.  Too rustic.  Yes.  It was too rustic.

She rapped smartly on the door and stepped back, bracing herself against the storm that was barely contained behind it.

 

 

She was greeted with a gun shoved in her face, only to have it hastily drawn away.  "Joan!"  The tone was falsely aggrandizing, all buster and bravado when none was evident anywhere else on the speaker's person.  Joan watched as Jamie Moriarty tucked the gun into the waistband of her pants and stepped forward.  One step, two steps.  Close enough to see that Joan had gotten sweaty biking over here, close enough that Joan could feel her breath on hastily moistened lips.  Close enough to make Joan take half a step back.

Moriarty stepped back, looking almost crest-fallen.  "You are the last person I expected to find darkening my doorway."

"You told me to come see you in a year."

"But it isn't been a year yet, has it Joan?"

Joan's teeth click together, biting back the words that spring to mind.  Words and accusations and everything they both know to be true. She would never have complied with that request. It would be too telling.  "No," she answered.  "It hasn't."

"Then you must tell me, Joan Watson, why it is that you're here."

 

Joan did not have an answer for Moriarty, at least not one that felt good enough to pass her lips and offer herself up for absolution.  She shifted from foot to canvas sneakered foot and tried not to tremble under the force of the scrutiny of the woman before her.  Jamie Moriarty looked exhausted, like she’d been up half the night on a child’s deathbed and only with dawn had come the absolution that she was fully free to fall into Morpheus’ embrace.  Dark circles sat heavy under her eyes, showing even through the heavy concealer she wore. Her hands were shaking around the gun that she’d shoved, almost haphazardly, into the waistband of her jeans. 

It was then that Joan saw them: raised red and angry across her pale skin, the scars of their previous encounter, the marks of Moriarty’s ordeal laid bare for the whole world to see.  She had hurt herself, hurt herself to the point where her body was irreparably scarred.  It struck Joan as odd, this wearing of the scars so openly, no bangles or attempts to cover them up with long sleeves.  Moriarty was dressed in a simple t-shirt and jeans.  They were casual, but Joan had a discerning eye for fashion and could recognize the quality in them almost without thought. .  The shirt was a deep blue that offset her eyes and was obviously well out of Joan’s price range, even upon a second, closer look.  Joan watched Moriarty’s eyes, so blue against the shirt, as they darted nervously from the walk to land on Joan’s borrowed bicycle and back to Joan’s sneakers and shorts. 

“Would you like to come inside for a drink?”

She said it so politely that Joan looked up sharply, a retort at her lips that had no business being there.  It was an honest request, a friendly one even.  She bit back her accusations of murder and being a terrible person and bowed her head in acquiescence.  “That would be nice.  It was longer than I thought, coming in from the station.”

“You should have called.” Moriarty stepped aside and allowed Joan into the beach house.  “I would have come and got you.  Saved you the trouble of operating a bicycle meant for a man a good foot taller than you.”

Joan shrugged, standing in the house’s foyer and looking around.  She toed off her shoes, realizing that Moriarty was barefoot on the cold hardwood floors and not wanting to seem rude.  The small entryway opened into a large, open space that was dominated by two large bay windows on the far side of the room that overlooked the sea.  One was set out from the wall, a cushion and several pillows pressed up against the glass.  A cream-colored blanket spilled out onto the floor like an avalanche high in the mountains, top held in place by a book with a title that Joan did not recognize.  It was the only part of this place that looked lived in at all.  Everything else appeared as Joan assumed it had upon Moriarty’s arrival, clean, devoid of sand and any sort of personal touches that would make this a summer destination for many families for years to come.  There were no signs of Moriarty on the end tables, or creases in the perfectly starched couches.  Only the window seat and a solitary mug with a paper label and string wrapped around its handle gave any indication that the house was occupied at all.

Moriarty moved with a familiar grace of one who had spent many months confined within these walls. She crossed over to the window seat and picked up the blanket, depositing it in a heap on the faded sky blue cushion.  She bent, picking up the discarded mug and holding it between her fingers limply at her side.  “Why are you here?” she asked again.  Her eyes were half-hidden under her hair as it fell into her eyes, her attention somewhere at her feet.  Eyes fixed, as Joan’s were, on the scar at her wrist.

There was no avoiding it.  Agent Matoo had wanted Joan to be the one to explain this to Moriarty.  “She’ll take it better coming from you than from me,” he had said.  Joan thought he was lying then and she wanted to lie now that she was faced with that awful truth.  The secrets that Moriarty kept were never meant to be told, and she’d bartered them al for her freedom.  Every last one until there was nothing left but the mind of this woman who seemed so small with her scarred wrists and pretty dress. 

“Agent Matoo asked me to come and look in on you.”

“At the very least you could tell me the truth, Joan.  You and I both know that Ramses might have asked you to come, but your presence here is purely through your own volition.  You want something from me-“

“I don’t.”  Joan moved to sit on the couch opposite the window seat.  She fidgeted with her bag, and then pulled out the heavily doctored file that Agent Matoo had given her before he’d left her apartment.  She held it out without saying a word.  She wanted Moriarty to know, because the last time someone shared personal information about her, a little girl ended up kidnapped. Joan would not let that happen again.  Enough people died the first time.  “Laramie Straus has been robbed.”

Moriarty’s fingers were white clutching the papers in the folder as she read its contents quickly.  Her eyes moved so fast that Joan could barely keep track of where she was in the reports that were inside the folder.  She watched as Moriarty’s scowl deepened, and her fingers started to crease the folder that held the report.  This was the reaction Joan was expecting. Violent.  Sudden. 

“How did Ramses know about this account?” Moriarty asked.  She lowered the papers to regard Joan.  The look on her face was one that Joan had seen many times before.  The look of an animal cornered, ready to fight their way out; the look of a woman ready to do anything to protect her own secrets.  “No one knew about this account.”

“Someone evidently did.  And they have whatever you kept in that safety deposit box.”

 

Moriarty rose, her feet hitting the floor silently.  Her back was turned in such a way that Joan could not see any emotion betrayed on her face.  Joan leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands clasped together.  "Look."  Her voice sounded small, but it filled this big, alien room almost effortlessly.  "I don't really care what was in that box.  It's not my--"

"My mother's jewelry.  My medical records.  It wasn't anything..." Moriarty trailed off, turning to smile almost cruelly at Joan.  Her teeth looked sharp, pointy in the bright sunlight of this unfamiliar beach house.  She looked like a predator.  "Untoward," she settled on, "As you seem to suspect Joan.  Secrets, certainly, but nothing particularly riveting."

Joan, despite not having been a doctor for some time, inclined her head.  She would not ask what was contained in those files, she was not Moriarty's doctor and she had no interest in being.  She took a stab in the dark, guessing at their contents.  "They prove you're human."

"That my skin rebelled, tried to mutate and devour itself?  Yes."  Moriarty wrapped her arms around herself and Joan bit her lip.  It was a strange way to describe what was probably just a precancerous mole.  Sherlock, in one of his more morose moments, had told her of the way the freckles danced down Irene's back and seemed to map out the stars.  Joan thought he was acting like a lovesick child, but she understood that he found it breathtakingly beautiful.  "What is more troubling is the other information contained in that folder."

The name of the child goes unsaid, but Joan's mind flies to that little girl and the bloody remains of Devon Gaspar, his throat all but clawed open for them to see.  Moriarty still bore the scares of that encounter, and she wore them well.

"That is troubling."

"I've already moved them once this year; I'd hate to have to do it again."  Moriarty crossed into the kitchen and got a glass down from a high cupboard.  She filled it at the sink and paused to retrieve a handful of ice cubes from the freezer before turning and heading back to stand before Joan.  She held out the glass like it was some sort of a peace offering.

Joan reached up, took the glass, her mumbled thank you lost in the unfathomable look in Moriarty's eyes.  She couldn't look away.  They'd never had a moment like this, where there hadn't been an undercurrent of animosity, of Moriarty’s mocking smirk and Joan's hatred of everything that she'd done to Sherlock.

"What did Ramses want me to do about it?"

Joan shrugged.  "He seemed convinced you'd act, once you heard."

"He doesn't know me as well as he claims, if that is what he suspects my plan of action to be."  Moriarty moved to sit opposite Joan on the window seat.  Joan took a sip of the water, grateful that it had been offered after all.  "You were meant to intercept me."

"I was."

"Why?"

"I..."  Joan looked down at her hands, sighing.  She didn't know why Agent Matoo had decided that she would be the one to waylay Moriarty.  She didn't want to be that person. "I don't know."

Moriarty leaned back against a throw pillow, one hand and then the other wrapping around a raised knee.  "He assumed - incorrectly, I must point out - that you hold some sort of sway over me."  Her lips quirked up at the corners.  "But we both know that isn't true."

"I'm sure."  Joan smiled back at Moriarty, just as fakely as she was smiling at Joan.  It was part of the game that they played.

 

The silence that filled the room was deafening.  In the distance, the surf lapped at the shore and cicadas and crickets hummed in the grasses that lined the beach.  Joan chewed at the inside of her cheek.  They were having a standoff and she refused to be the one to back down first.

Moriarty, for her part, was staring at Joan like she was a particularly interesting specimen.  It was the scrutiny that Joan was used to around Moriarty.  A systemic misunderstanding of her person that was cloaked in mystery and wrapped in something that could only be considered alien, if it weren't so blatantly obvious what was missing.

"I suppose that he'd like me to take this on," Moriarty said, apropos of nothing.  There was a glint of something in her eye.  Vindictive glee, perhaps, at Joan coming to her for assistance; or maybe even a spark of intrigue that she couldn't quite suppress behind that blank mask of schooled indifference.  "Solve the crime and get all that important information back."

"What makes you think important information was stolen in the first place?"  This comment earned Joan a baleful look.

"I consider my own records important information Joan.  But I'm sure if my safe was burgled, others were as well.  That would make this heist quite the coup wouldn't it?  It isn't often that a Swiss bank gets caught unawares like this, and I must confess a certain academic interest in the logistics of such a heist."  Moriarty grinned, wide and genuine.  "Have you ever been to Geneva, Joan?"


	4. iii

Mathieu could not stop his leg from bouncing.  Up and down, up and down it went, his eyes trained on the floor and the brown envelope in his hands.  He twisted it over and over, sucking moodily on the cigarette that dangled lifelessly from his lips.  He knew better than to look.  Roscoe had made it abundantly clear that they were not to pry into the affairs of their employer.

He wanted to know, though.  He’d never been a particularly strong-willed man, Mathieu.  He favored the shadows because they suited him.  He didn’t like to be noticed, but he noticed people.  It was how he fell into work with his current employer, how he twisted it into something perverse that suited his purposes.

Curiosity would always be a thief's downfall.

He eased the back of the envelope open and slid the file folder out, glancing around the abandoned office. He had time, yet, before the others would arrive.  The folder contained a name, and a careful documentation of every childhood bump and bruise.  A pregnancy termination at seventeen, a bout of pneumonia that almost left ended in death; a child.  Mathieu's eyes narrowed.  A child?

Wasn't that how Gaspar had gotten himself killed?

Mathieu turned the page over, reading the cramped handwriting on the back of the page, discussing the arrangements for a closed adoption.  He could do something with this, he knew that he could.  They had been given this opportunity like a blessing.  His employer had nothing on him, he was an outside contractor.

"Vous êtez bête."  Mathieu froze, hearing the hammer of a gun drawn back.  He looked straight ahead, the pictures of a little girl with brown hair and blue eyes shaking in his hand.  There would be no chance to think on this, it seemed.

The trigger was pulled and Mathieu saw nothing more.  His body crumpled forward, spray from the wound that cleaved his face in two splattering the wall and the desk before him.

William Roscoe looked down at the crumpled remains of their master thief and scowled.  He had hoped that it would not come to this, but she did not tolerate deviation from her orders, and her plans were flawless.  She would have done it herself, had Roscoe not been present and willing to eliminate the threat to her anonymity.

Blood and brain matter splattered the floor and desk.  The folder was crumpled underneath Mathieu's body.  Roscoe kicked him over and tugged it out from his lifeless hand.  He scowled at the blood that was splattered on the folder and tucked it back into the envelope.  A body was not ideal in such a location, but not an insurmountable challenge.  They were technically squatting, the building was under a renovation contract that hadn't been paid.  No one had been here in months.

Roscoe slipped the envelope under his arm and pulled his phone from his pocket. A quiet sigh escaped his lips.  This would need to be called in, for it could not be neglected.  Mathieu was well known in some circles.  They would need to establish a cause beyond a violation of privacy if this plan were to work.

The phone crackled and hummed.  Roscoe frowned at down at Mathieu's crumpled body, careful to keep his expensive boots out of the pooling blood at his feet.  The line clicked to life, no greeting.  "It's me."

"What can I do for you, Mr. Roscoe?"  Their employer spoke in a cool, quiet voice that betrayed a companion or a public place.  The sound of the voice was enough to make Roscoe stand up straighter and shift nervously from foot to foot.  His boot squished in Mathieu's blood.  "I trust everything is in order?"

"We've a slight hiccup," he replied.  "Mathieu found the files; he knew the true target all along."

"Or was it just a coincidence? Mr. Roscoe I am not one to panic over a curious cat.  I trust you handled it."

"I did. Mathieu found the files; he knew to open the folder.  He saw the content.  I can't guarantee that he didn't tell someone."

"Then kill your team.  And then yourself, Mr. Roscoe.  I do not tolerate failure."

He hoped that the remark was supposed to be as facetious as sounded. "It's just that this--"

"Fix it, Roscoe.  Do not call me again unless you have actual news to report."

Roscoe was left holding his phone to his ear as the line clicked off into silence.  He lowered it, tucking it into his pants pocket and looking down at Mathieu's crumpled body.  "You made this into a bloody mess, mate."

Mathieu's lifeless eyes stared up at him and Roscoe sighed, running a tired hand over his three day old beard.  This was an unfortunate development, and he was no good at such games.  He tugged the folder out from underneath his arm and opened it up, selecting the bloodiest page of the contents that he was sure where duplicated in a hundred different places.  It detailed a pregnancy, the pregnancy that had gotten Devon Gaspar killed for attempting to exploit.

It was perfect.  Leaving it would solidify the next stage of the plan.

In a way, Mathieu's curiosity had been a great boon to this enterprise.  In a way, his death would absolve them all from guilt.  There were, after all, far more damning details on that paper then the bullet in Mathieu's brain.  And Interpol was nothing if not predictable.

Roscoe bent and pick up Mathieu’s discarded packet of cigarettes.  He tugged one free and lit it lazily, sucking in smoke and death, waiting for his nerves to calm.  Rodriguez and Brusseau would be here soon enough, and he’d have to explain to them that if this got out, it would be on their heads.  No one could know.  Not just yet.  That would come later.


	5. iv

iv

_“I wanted to be part of something_

_I got nothing but time_

_So the future is mine”_

Traveling with Moriarty had never been a part of the equation. Agent Matoo asked Joan to speak to Moriarty, to tell her of the events that had transpired in Switzerland.  After that, there were no further instructions.  It never occurred to him, Joan knew, that Moriarty would offer something so seemingly simple and yet so utterly complicated.

The sound of the ocean filled Joan's ears.  It echoed, a hollow rushing sound, that consumed the entire room and choked away the fullness of Moriarty and all that she was pretending not to be.

This was never meant to be the outcome and Joan felt like she was suffocating under the intense gaze of the woman in the window seat, one leg curled underneath her and the toes of the other tapping out a barefoot rhythm that made sense no on one but her.  It would be so easy to lie, to bolster herself up with false words that would surely give rise to deceitful platitudes slipping from Moriarty's lips.

Joan was not one for the easy way out. "No," she answered.  "I've never been."

Moriarty got to her feet, pulling the blanket that was half on the floor up and folding it in precise, measured motions. She set it down and placed her book on top of it, fingers smoothing the cover flat and tucking the receipt that she was using as a bookmark more firmly into place. "It's lovely at this time of year, everything is so green."

"Is this your way of asking me to go with you?"

"Wasn't that why Agent Matoo asked you to look in on me, Joan?  To make sure if I did do something rash that I'd sweep you along in my wake?"  Moriarty leveled appraising eyes on Joan's cut-off shorts and sweaty cheeks.  Joan licked her lips nervously and looked down at the dewing glass of water in her hands.  It felt slippery, like she would drop it at any possible moment.  "I've never had quite so intriguing an angel to sit upon my shoulder."

"Stop it."

"Stop what?"

"Treating me like I'm sort of exotic creature for you to dissect to your heart's content."  Joan looked up, eyebrows drawn together in determination, daring Moriarty to argue.

Moriarty reached out and took the glass from Joan's hand, wet fingers splaying out over Joan's wrist.  Joan moved to draw her hand away when those damp fingers gripped Joan's wrist so tightly Joan was sure she would bruise.

The roar of the distant waves filled Joan's ears and she could not breathe.  Moriarty's face was so close to her own that Joan could see the little flecks of black that danced across the blue of her eyes and she felt like she was drowning.

"You are so much more than that, Joan.  Do not think me fool enough to undervalue you twice."  Her grip loosened, but she did not let go.  "I will ask only once, will you come to Geneva with me?"

Joan looked away, down at the sterile couch cushion with its bland pattern and shabby appearance.  "Why?" she asked.

Moriarty sucked her lower lip into her mouth, a nervous expression so deliberate that Joan was certain it was affected and not genuine. The hesitation that followed, however, was real. Joan stared at her, afraid to look away from the deliberate play of emotions across her face.  "If things do become..." Moriarty paused, as if searching for a word, "Unpleasant, I think your presence would help."

"Would it?"  It was the closest thing to a polite invitation Joan was going to get and they both knew it.

"If my suspicions as to the reasons for this heist are confirmed, your presence may be the only thing that prevents me from becoming a suspect, Joan."

Joan's eyes narrowed.  "Should you be a suspect?"

"Now Joan, why would anyone go to so much trouble to rob themselves?"

 

Agent Matoo's phone went straight to voicemail.  After three tries, standing out on Moriarty's porch, Joan was ready to throw in the towel.  Moriarty made her own calls, once she was sure Joan’s attention was elsewhere.  Joan didn’t hear what she said, only that her face grew drawn and worried and she hung up the phone her fingers where gripping the small black mobile so tightly they were white.

"Are you even free to leave the country?"

From underneath a ridiculous sun hat, Moriarty turned to regard Joan with curious eyes.  "Why wouldn't I be?"

Joan wiped her hand across her sweaty forehead.  "Aren't you on parole?"

"No," Moriarty said flatly.  She shifted, her rolled up jeans gathering above her ankles and falling uneven.  She looked so young that Joan's breath caught in her throat.  "I gave away everything I had."

"I somehow doubt that."  Moriarty would not give away all of her secrets even in death. Moriarty, for her part, blithely nods, and Joan puffs out her cheeks in annoyance. She did not know who she was more annoyed at, at this present moment, Agent Matoo for leaving her without an appropriate course of action (although Joan was starting to think that was by design) or Moriarty for speaking in riddles. "Believe what you will, Joan."

"I can't just up and go to Switzerland with you."

"What's stopping you?  Are you on a case right now?  Would you be missed?"

Joan bit her lip and looked out over the tangle of raspberry bushes and beach grass that grew wild beside the steps heading down to the beach.  The raspberries were large and red, ready to be picked.  Joan wondered if Moriarty had even noticed that they were ripe, or if this place was merely a stop gap for her to regroup before she fell back into her old ways.

She wouldn't be missed, and that was the problem.  She could go and no one would think twice.  Agent Matoo's request had not been out of the blue, it had been timed, very carefully, to the evening following a successful arrest in a case that Joan and Marcus had been working on for two weeks.  She had no other cases, and her mother was out of town, visiting her step-father in what Joan was sure to be yet another failed attempt at making their marriage work.

"No."  Her voice was barely audible, evne to herself, over the sound of the distant surf and buzzing cicadas.  "I wouldn't be."

"Then we should leave immedietly."

 

 

Joan's passport was put away.  She hadn't had cause to use it in well over a year, and when she'd removed her things from Sherlock's home, she'd put it with her personal effects in the one place she thought was safe from Sherlock's prying eyes.  Where she thought she could protect herself from those who sought to hurt her through him and him through her.

The bank was in Midtown, more inconvenient than anything else.  Moriarty trailed half a step behind Joan the entire way, hands plunged into the pockets of her light summer jacket.  They weren't speaking, and when Joan was taken into the vault, Moriarty did not ask to follow.

It was only after, when Joan emerged with the little blue book in hand, that Moriarty spoke:

"Is that your only one?"

"No, I had another when I was in my twenties."  Joan looked down at her feet, irritation rising in her throat.  It was a strange question, and not one that she felt Moriarty had any business knowing the answer to. "They took it when they gave me a new one."

"Any travel to Africa, Asia?"

"Yes, and South America too if you'd like to cover all the other continents I've been to."  Joan stopped in the middle of the busy street turned to stare openly at Moriarty.  Her passport, safely tucked into her purse, was now open in Moriarty's hands.  "How..."

"You're not the only one Sherlock taught slight of hand." Moriarty flipped through the pages, her expression schooled to the disinterested.  "China, China, Monaco, Spain, France, Canada, Brazil, Canada, England... my, Joan, you've been a busy girl."

Joan scowled. "I like to travel."

Moriarty turned the page, admiring the stamp that Joan had gotten from Greek customs three summers ago. "But never Switzerland?"

"I tend to bank domestic."

"Your loss, you'd save a great deal of money avoiding the taxes your government charges on your capital gains."

"I like to think my taxes are fueling important things. Like roads and schools."

Moriarty raised an eyebrow.  "Surely you know that there is very little chance that your money is going into anything other than bloated defense spending."

"Maybe I like to lie to myself."

 

Agent Matoo called back when Joan was halfway through hurriedly throwing clothes into a suitcase.  She had no idea what to bring with her, caught between the heat of the city in the summer and the oddly romantic idea of the Swiss Alps.  She shoved another sweater into the bag, just in case.

"She wants you to go with her to investigate."  Agent Matoo did not imply how he knew and Joan did not ask.  She had not left him any messages, but she supposed that even the most logical of minds would have deduced the most obvious course of action.

She doesn’t know why she's called him.  She'd told Moriarty that it was because she wanted to make sure that he was aware of what they were doing, but it really was no matter.  Moriarty was a free woman, despite the stupidity of the government for letting her walk free.  Agent Matoo had no bearing one way or the other as to what she did any longer.

"Is that going to be a problem?"  Joan asked.

"No."  Agent Matoo sighed, and Joan could hear papers rustling over the line. "There is one slight problem, however."

"What sort of a problem?"

"A body was found shot in Paris last night, execution style.  French authorities are still investigating, but there is a good chance that Interpol will step in."

"Why?"

"It appears that the man shot, one Charles Mathieu, was a well-known thief in some circles.  He had a page of medical records on his person, and I think you can guess who they belonged to."

Joan frowned.  Moriarty had made no calls and had not used a phone the entire time they'd been together. "Do they think she's involved?"

"A person of interest, perhaps, but not a suspect.  Not at the present moment anyway."

"Will this compromise us going to Geneva?"

"I shouldn't think so." Agent Matoo let out a quiet hum.  "I've sent you rest of the case file digitally. The bank will expect you."

Joan tilted her head up to the water stained ceiling of her new apartment.  It felt empty here, surrounded by her things.  Despite the sparse living of her time with Sherlock, the house had never felt empty, not like the hollow feeling that gripped Joan every time she walked into this apartment.

"Will they?"

"I told my contact there that I was in contact with people who could help... discretely."

"They don't know it was Moriarty who was robbed?"

Agent Matoo hesitated for just a moment.  "There is another matter, one that I need you to look into on  your own."

"I'm listening."

"There was a woman who worked at that bank about two and a half years ago now, her name was Clémence D'Ory.  I sent her information to you and I'd appreciate you not sharing it with Moriarty.  She was killed in a car accident that looked good at the time, but I think she may have been involved in the initial set up for this heist."

Joan frowned.  "Why can't I tell Moriarty then?"

"Because for a time prior to her accident, Clémence D'Ory was involved with a woman.  NO one knows who she was, and the only thing that I - or anyone knows about her - is that she bears a striking resemblance to Moriarty."  Agent Matoo pauses.  "You understand my hesitance?"

Only too well.  "I do."

"Then you'll understand why this needs to be done as discretely as possible.  Clémence D'Ory was probably an inside man regardless of her connection to Moriarty."

 

The flight that Moriarty had managed to book them went through Amsterdam and then on to Geneva.

Joan had hated transatlantic flights since she was a child and going to France with her grandparents for the first time.  That flight, at age eleven, had taken far longer than any flight should have taken - a red eye that turned into a full day of tourism before she'd finally been allowed to sleep.

The suffocating, oppressive feeling of the cabin as Joan stepped into the plane, and the - oh god - three infants that were within easy view of their seats made Joan feel sick to her stomach.  There was Dramamine in her purse, if it got to that point, but Joan was hesitant to take it when her traveling companion was an avowed murderer.  She took a deep breath, and then another, reaching up to make sure that the air vent over her seat was on before she sat down.

She felt twitchy, just settling into her somewhat roomy business class seat next to Moriarty, trying to hide her surprise that Moriarty was flying commercial and not in first class.  It wasn't easy to hide anything at all from Moriarty, a simple glance or inhalation could speak volumes.  Joan was used to Sherlock, used to how he observed and deduced and assumed things; Moriarty was different, she never called it a guess - just a truth that she believed so ruthlessly that it was as if it was bullied into validity.

"Business class offers some amenities without drawing the attention of first class," Moriarty explained, as if sensing Joan's confusion.  She pulled a battered paperback - its cover held in place with scotch tape - from her purse, as well as the newspaper, and tucked them into the seat back in front of her.  "You should try and get some sleep, we've a long day once we land."

"I won't sleep," Joan confessed.  "I never can on planes."

Moriarty smiled small and mysterious.  Joan wanted to scowl, because she wasn't nearly as interesting as she liked to think she was.  "Would you like me to tell you a story?"

Joan stuck her lip out petulantly. "I'm not a child."

Leaning over, Moriarty jerked the case file out of Joan's purse.  She opened it and tapped the name that Agent Matoo had so casually mentioned to Joan just hours before.  One perfectly shaped nail tapping out some strange pattern on Clémence D'Ory's name. "He warned you not to mention her to me."

"He might have."  There was little point in lying, especially when Moriarty clearly already knew the answer to the question that went unasked.  "Tell me about her."

"That's hardly a story, Joan."

"Maybe I want to hear it."

A sigh pushed its way past Moriarty's carefully blank expression.  "She was a rebound. After Sherlock."

"I wasn't aware people like you have rebounds."

"You'd be surprised," Moriarty answered, her wrist twisting to show the raised, red scar.  Joan stared at it as though it held all the answers of the great mysteries of the universe, all looping, twisted skin and still healing tissue.  It was swollen, still.  They hadn't done a good job stitching her back together after she'd split herself in two - all in the name of a child she'd never known.  "What people like me, as you put it, do when in love."

"You weren't in love with her."  The idea of Moriarty sleeping with a woman didn't jar Joan nearly as much as she thought it should.  Maybe it was the way that Moriarty looked at her, the way her lips parted when Joan got too close, maybe it was just the fact that there was nothing that Joan would put past Moriarty.

"No." Moriarty looked away.  "I was not.  But she was a welcome distraction to keep me away from Sherlock.  She kept me in Europe, in Geneva, when all I wanted was to come to New York and -" She trailed off, but Joan could fill in the rest of that sentence on her own.  It was, after all, the secret of Moriarty that she'd figured out long after Moriarty had convinced herself to believe the lie that it wasn't true.

"Do you... still?"

"I don't think there is a future there." Moriarty tilted her head back to look at the reading lights and air vents above their heads.  "I enjoy our correspondence, however.  He is an excellent sounding board."

"He's still in love with her - you..." Joan ran a tired hand over face, settling on the name of the woman of Moriarty's creation and Sherlock's imagination. " _Irene_."

Moriarty said nothing for a long time.

 

"Honesty doesn't suit you."

"Whatever do you mean, Joan?"  Moriarty turned a page in her battered paperback.  Joan could read the title now, and she was a bit surprised at Moriarty's choice of literature.  Asimov was for nerds in her experience; she was expecting Moriarty to be reading someone incomprehensible.  Perhaps they both defied each other’s expectations.

"You telling me about Clémence D'Ory, it doesn't... jive."

"Ramses asked you to not mention her to me."  Moriarty closed the book and curled her fingers around it's fraying binding _.  The Gods Themselves._   Joan had never read it.

Joan turned to face Moriarty properly. "He suspects that she was involved with the initial planning stages of the robbery."

Moriarty gave a little humph of laughter. "How Ramses is getting his information is more of a mystery than that, I think.  He's a US Marshal. He's not even working with an organization that would liaise with Interpol or foreign authorities."  Moriarty looked down at her book, her fingers curling, twisting the battered paperback.

"You know who did this."  It wasn't a question.

"It isn't that simple, Joan.  Not anymore."


	6. v

Their connector flight in Amsterdam came with a two and a half hour layover.  Joan brushed her teeth in the bathroom and returned to the gate lounge where Moriarty had commandeered an entire row of seats for them to share.  She was cradling a cup of something steaming to her chest, her eyes distant and lost in thought, staring off into the middle distance.  She looked through Joan as though she wasn't even there and Joan swallowed, settling down beside her and taking the cup that was handed to her wordlessly.  It was coffee, cheap airport coffee, but warm and spicy on her tongue.

"You put ... nutmeg in this?"  She guessed at the flavor, but there was something there that wasn't normally in coffee.  She took another sip.

Moriarty made a quiet humming noise at the back of her throat.  "And a hint of cocoa. You've a good palate to pull out the flavor."

"It's good."

"You're welcome."

They lapsed into silence, think and oppressive, like an airport full of Dutch speakers.  It was a language that sounded enough like English when spoken to throw Joan off, ears pricking up to hear fragments of conversations only to find them falling on dead ears.  She could not understand them.

There was a question that Joan wanted to ask Moriarty, one that she thought would prove an interesting conversation should they actually start on it.  Moriarty's involvement with Clémence D'Ory was so intriguing to Joan.  She'd never had cause, really, to think of Moriarty as anything other than straight.  She reveled in making people uncomfortable, Joan thought she was probably Moriarty's favorite person for doing just that, but her involvement with Sherlock was so all-consuming.  It didn't seem possible, and yet Agent Matoo had said it and Moriarty had not offered any rebuttal.

Joan took a deep breath.

"Have you always considered yourself bisexual?"

"No."  Moriarty did not meet Joan's eyes.  "Do you, Joan?"

Her mouth clamped shut, panic rising in her throat.  It tasted of bile, of the organic response to fear that she could never quite control.  She could not tell Moriarty the truth, that she wasn't.  That she couldn't be.  She was old enough now that even her very traditional mother had floated the idea (as absolutely unacceptable, but a possibility,) as she wasn’t married to a Doctor or Lawyer with two-point-five kids in the suburbs.  Not that the kids were really an option any more - she'd already started to see the early signs of menopause. Her mother had been young as well.

"I don't care for labels."

"Perhaps I am the same way."

"I don't think you are."

"Why not?" Moriarty turned to look at Joan then, eyes narrowed and curious.

"You make a living on making assumptions about people, why should you not make them about yourself as well?"

Moriarty's lips pursed into a thin, maddening line, but she did not speak again.  Their plane was boarding soon anyway.  Once they reached Geneva this would be easier, they would have things to talk about beyond things that could not be spoken of.

"I do what I want, Joan.  What is convenient and advantageous to me.  I do not fall in love."

And though Joan knew her for a liar, she said nothing.

 

They were stopped at customs in Geneva.  Joan heard the low intonation of, "Bugger," escape Moriarty's lips as the customs official took both of their passports and asked them to come with him into a small room set aside for translation and more thorough background checks.

A man was sitting in the room, tall and young-looking.  Joan guessed him to be in his early thirties, maybe a year or two younger than Moriarty.  His charcoal gray suit spoke to a bureaucrat and not wealth, but his tie was perfectly straight and very clearly of good quality.  It brought out the green in his eyes and set of the trendy haircut that he had slicked back away from his forehead.  "Sit down, sit down."  He did not bother to get to his feet, instead taking the time to pull thick-rimmed glasses from his eyes and set them off to the side of the papers that were stacked neatly in front of him.  He bridged his fingers as Joan sat down.  "Ms. Moriarty," he added, watching as Moriarty stared at the chair.

"I've been sitting for many hours, Mr. Malphrus, surely we can do this standing?"

Malphrus shrugged.  "As you wish."  He turned to Joan, a small smile playing at his lips.  "My name is Andrew Malphrus, Interpol."  He tilted his head to one side.  "I am the one who called you both here."

"Then I am not a suspect?"

"A person of interest.  I have it on good authority that you were out of the country and... unable to arrange such a heist."  He smiled wanly at Moriarty and she smiled right back.  Joan wanted to pull away from her, from that smile that said absolutely nothing that should be contained within a smile.  It was threatening, all teeth and aggressive curl of lips, it was something that Joan never wanted to see again.

"Good."

"I want to know why an establishment connected to you was hit."

"Occam’s razor, Mr. Malphrus, it was purely a coincidence."  Joan's eyes narrowed.  She heard the lie rather than saw it, the slight change in inflection, the heightening the charm that Moriarty cultivated so easily.  "Don't a great many Swiss, German and French politicians also do business with Laramie Straus?  How do you know that it is my connection to the bank that is cause for alarm?"

Andrew Malphrus tapped the side of his nose.  "Call it intuition."

Joan did not like him.  There was something about the uncomfortable way his presence filled the entire small room that they occupied that made Joan feel like she was choking on perfectly good air.  She frowned, leaning forward to get a look at his paperwork.  It was all in French, and she sighed, sitting back. Her reading skills for that particular language had taken a nosedive since college.

"If we are not suspects, Mr. Malphrus, why are we here?"  It was a gamble that she had to take, and she could hear Moriarty's quiet inhale behind her.  Perhaps it was too bold a question, then.

"Ms. Watson you were never a suspect in the first place.  I have an arrangement with Ramses Matoo."  A faint flush appeared across his cheeks.  Joan could not fault his taste, even if she was fairly certain that Sherlock had mentioned that Agent Matoo was happily married to a charming Professor at Columbia.  "Since Mr. Holmes was not available, he requested that you come at once, along with Ms. Moriarty, in an attempt to recover the stolen property."

"And London?"  Moriarty asked sharply.

"Will be kept in the loop."  Malphrus leaned forward.  "Your freedom was conditional, you know that as well as the rest of the people in this room, Ms. Moriarty.  Do not throw away that goodwill."

Moriarty's face contorted into a scowl, full of anger and hatred and - perhaps most shocking to Joan - hurt.  "I would think that stopping three major terrorist plots would earn me more than mere goodwill."  There was a dark undercurrent to her tone that matched the mood of the place.  Joan didn't understand what was happening, but she wasn’t stupid; there was a lot more happening here than met the eye.

 

Malphrus let them leave with a promise to be in touch as the investigation progressed and Joan found herself whisked away through arrivals to a waiting nondescript black SUV with Swiss plates and a driver standing beside the door dressed in a smart suit.  Moriarty stepped ahead, greeting the driver in German, shaking his hand and inquiring as to their luggage.  The driver indicated the trunk of the car.  "In the boot," he said, and held the door open to for Moriarty.

The partition was up and Moriarty made no effort to direct the driver.  She sat back, purse on her lap as Joan stared at her expectantly.  There were so many questions she wanted to ask. So many lies within truth within lies that she simply had to have the answers to.

She settled, perhaps foolishly, on the obvious one at first.  "Interpol is based in Lyon."  It was one of the first things she'd learned when she'd first started working with Sherlock: that Interpol was not some European version of the FBI.  They had no actual power, and functioned mostly as liaisons and investigators. Sherlock hated their maddeningly neutral stance on most things, but Joan found it refreshing.  It still did not explain why they were so keen to have a conversation with Moriarty, however.  Moriarty was anything but a neutral party where most things were concerned.

"It is."

Joan turned to look at Moriarty, to take in the feigned disinterest and careful set of her jaw.  Moriarty didn't like this line of questioning, that much was blatantly obvious.  Joan wanted to know why, but she knew that her companion would not be forthcoming with the answers.  She tilted her head, hair spilling over her shoulder, a thoughtful frown pulling at her lips.  Moriarty's attention shifted, turning back into the conversation, and Joan sprung her question. "So why are you concerned about London?"

"Andrew and I have known each other a very long time Joan, let us leave it at that."  Moriarty sighed dismissively.

Undeterred, Joan pressed on. "Is he on your payroll?"

"I do not make a habit of incriminating myself around those who are on the side of angels, Watson."

"That doesn’t answer my question."

"No, I suppose it does not."

"Is this how it's going to be?"

Moriarty's lips quirked upwards, but the expression vanished behind a blank mask of indifference.  "Do not expect me to spill my secrets."

"Fine."

 

"Do you think that Clémence D'Ory could have been involved in the heist?"

Moriarty inclined her head.  "She never struck me as particularly bright, pretty faces so rarely are.  It would not shock me, no."

What went unsaid was something Joan knew she was mean to infer.  Moriarty had manipulated Clémence D'Ory, as was her habit.  It would be up to Joan to determine if that information was relevant.  Moriarty would not profess her crime so easily, if a crime was indeed to be had.

"What was she like?"

"As I said, pretty."  Moriarty's lips twisted into a slow, sinister, smile.  "She was good in bed, is that what you want to hear?"

"I'm just trying to understand her."

"I am not the person to ask, then."  Moriarty looked away.  "I never made an effort to know her."  There was no shame in her voice, just the barest statement of fact.  Joan flinched at the coldness of it.  She had never known Moriarty to be anything but cold, but a dead lover seemed like as good as reason as any to suddenly turn into a person.

Agent Matoo's suspicions seemed clearer now.  Moriarty had been honest with Joan about the nature of the relationship that she'd had with Clémence D'Ory.  The pieces didn't fit, rearranging themselves in Joan's mind over and over until they were hopelessly jumbled.

The car slid to a stop behind a line of commuters. Ants all waiting in a row.

"You think I'm a monster."

Joan shook her head.  "It doesn't matter what I think."

The sharp, little laugh that escaped Moriarty's lips made Joan's jaw clamp shut.  Her teeth ground together in annoyance.  "Oh, but my dear Joan, you will see that it does." She gave Joan a dismissive little nod that made Joan's hand, resting limply in her lap, clench into a fist. "I'm not made of glass."

Moriarty was waiting for her damnation at Joan's lips.  Joan knew this, she knew it and she couldn't find the words to make it so.  She wanted to rub it in, to force Moriarty to admit her humanity.  It was a tall task, but one that was vital, Joan knew, to this working between them. She drew in a deep breath, unclenching her jaw and willing herself to speak calmly.  "I think you did come to care for her, in your own demented little way."

It was the reaction that she was waiting for.  The downwards pitch of Moriarty's lips and the slight furrowing her eyebrows.  Chips in her mask, the carefully blank, hugely intimidating mask that slipped so easily over those aristocratic features.  Joan hated it, even though she found that she could see through it was ease.

Sucking her teeth, Moriarty gave a tiny shrug. "Well, I would never say that word.  It isn't one for polite company."

A groan threatened to escape Joan's lips.  She concentrated on the insulting tone that had crept into Moriarty's speech, on the fact that Moriarty considered her polite company and not simply a chaperone to prevent a repeat of her near decapitation of her former lieutenant.

Joan closed her eyes, trying not to think of that moment, of seeing Moriarty, blood streaming down her once flawless wrists, looking up at Sherlock like a cat brought home a dead mouse.  It set Joan's stomach pitching downwards, a nervous swallow, and then another one.  This was not the way she wanted this conversation to shift.

"Why a woman?" she asked, inspiration striking her.

Moriarty looked up from her phone, brow slightly furrowed. "Mn?"

Joan turned so that they were facing each other in the seat, seatbelt cutting into her shoulder as she did so. "Why not a man?  Men are always easier."

The phone screen flickered blank and Moriarty turned her attention back to the window.  Her chin rested on her palm, elbow on the arm rest of the door.  "I suppose because she was beautiful.  I like beautiful things."

 

The bank was headquartered in a building that had Joan doing a double take as they approached it.  She was not sure if it was the lack of sleep or Moriarty's business-like stride that had her more on edge.  She wanted a bed, a hotel room and a chance to call Sherlock and Agent Matoo.

She hadn't told Sherlock that she was going.  She hadn't thought it prudent to give him cause to drop his entire investigation with MI-6 to coming running to her rescue from the clutches of Moriarty.  She didn't know how to tell him, which was part of the problem.  It wasn't because of Moriarty that she was here, after all.

Kayden Fuller was just a child, a child with no father because of Moriarty.  That guilt at being responsible for taking a child halfway to being an orphan must have weighed heavily on Moriarty. Joan could not let more people become aware of Moriarty's secret, because it would mean that that innocent girl was even more danger than she ever was from Devon Gaspar alone.

The interior of the bank was a wide open space that spanned two stories.  A staircase wrapped up around one wall and lead, Joan presumed, upstairs to the bank's offices and downstairs, probably, to the vault that had been burgled.  No one was around, save a mousey-looking man standing before the closed teller windows.  As they approached him, Joan could see that his glasses were smuggled and he worried compulsively at his lip.  His eyes, behind his glasses, bugged out as Moriarty strode up to him.

"M-mlle. Moriarty."  The stutter in his accented voice cut across the room like a gun shot.  His hands shook as he took half a step back, nervous as Moriarty, still shorter than him even in heels, drew level with him.

"Mr. Perrin," she answered.  She drew out at the beginning of his name, her voice low, dangerous.  They knew who she was here, or at least her name carried weight.  Joan stayed back, watching, curious.  "I received some rather distressing news, back in New York."

"Ah." Perrin visibly relaxed.  If Joan had to guess, she would estimate that he was worried about Moriarty would demand to access her vault.  "Then you know?"

"I do."  Moriarty's lip curled into a contemptuous sneer.  "I've brought my associate, Joan Watson, to help with the investigation."

"Madame, I assure you that there is no need--"

Moriarty cut him off.  "I will decide what is and is not necessary, Mr. Perrin."  She pulled the card that they'd been given at customs from her clutch and passed it over to Perrin with a flourish.  "I was asked to give this to you, Andrew Malphrus is a close family friend." If she heard Joan's sharp intake of breath at the mention of the words family and friend, she gave no outward signs.

"I can assure you that your fath--"

"I am aware, Mr. Perrin, and that is not the issue at hand."  Moriarty turned to Joan, her expression unreadable.  "Ms. Watson is here to liaise with the cantonal police and Interpol's investigation."

Perrin stared openly at her and Moriarty nodded curtly at him before sweeping from the room.  Joan blinked, confused and glancing between Moriarty's retreating back and Mr. Perrin.  "We'll be back, just got in," she stammered in clumsy French.  "My apologizes."

"It's alright," Perrin replied.  Joan flashed him a tight smile before hurrying after Moriarty.

 

"Your father banks here."  Joan let out a quiet breath as she slid into the car after Moriarty. 

Moriarty said nothing.

_You have a father..._


	7. vi

Roscoe's hands shook as he stepped out into the bright sunlight of the Parisian morning and shoved another cigarette into his mouth.  He cupped his hands against the warm June breeze and lit it despite the tremor in his hands.  He exhaled, blowing smoke skyward and spat on the ground. Killing always put him in the mood for religion and grand gestures, but there was no time for that now.  He had to cover all eventualities.

Mathieu was dead, and that was good.  He was asking too many questions and had chanced upon too many details far too quickly for Roscoe's liking.  The plan had always been to get caught, at least a little bit, and now he was having to reevaluate his assessment of the situation and quickly at that.  He could not appear empty handed before his employers.  They would know that not everything had gone according to plan.

From his pocket, his phone chirped, and Roscoe fumbled with it for a moment before bringing it to his ear.  "Roscoe."

The other line was static, crackling ominously. An international call before the connection dropped in smoothly. "Mathieu is dead."

"I know."  He hadn't expected her to call.  It was too early for that, the plan, as outlined in the detailed email that he had received, was for there to be no contact.  That was why this was working so well, why he was able to twist the rules of the game to suit his purposes.  "He stuck his nose into the wrong file."

"The whole goal of this exercise was discretion, Mr. Roscoe.  I fail to see how a murder in a very public place is discrete."  There was an icy hint to her voice, flinty and betraying no emotion at all, and that made Roscoe worried.  He'd heard her speak of Gaspar, he'd seen that police report and had been horrified with what that tiny waif of a woman was able to do with two hands and a vendetta.

A vendetta over the child that Devon Gaspar had kidnapped.

A plan hung half-formed and hazy just beyond Roscoe's vision.  He reached for it, trying to grasp it and allow it time to develop.  He needed to think, alone and quiet.  He had to get her off the phone.  "It was not my doing."  A lie and not a very convincing one.  _Merde._

"I find that very hard to believe, Mr. Roscoe." Her tone was skeptical. Roscoe ran a tired hand over his face, trying to think of a lie that would be convincing enough to pass her muster.  She was so much smarter than anyone he'd ever met; it was going to take a lot more doing than he was accustomed to pull the wool over her eyes.  "You were in the building with him, you had the means, and dare I say, the motive."

"Are you telling me that you'd like me to take the fall?"

"I am telling you that you need to tread lightly.  Mathieu’s death was inevitable, yes.  He saw things that he should not have seen, however, to leave such precious details behind, William?" She clucked her tongue and Roscoe knew he was lost.  He set his jaw and waited for the pronouncement of his doom.  "That was in poor taste.  Those are secrets that should not be left just lying about."

He rubbed his hand at the back of his neck and exhaled smoke through his nose.  The paper of his cigarette was sticking to his lower lip and he sucked it in quickly, before drawing it between thumb and middle finger from his mouth.  "I felt it would alleviate suspicion."

His employer chuckled, warm and threatening in one breathy sound.  "Congratulations, William, it has done exact opposite.  You know as well as I do that we cannot afford another slip up like Devon Gaspar right now.  You'd like to avoid his fate.”

Roscoe swallowed nervously and flicked ash off of the end of his cigarette.  He could see the high arching cathedrals of the inner city in the distance and he felt compulsion of years press down upon him to venture up those steps and into a dark sanctuary.  To say a prayer to St. Christopher and hope that it would be enough to keep him alive to long enough to see this through.

He tilted his gaze skyward.  It was early yet.  The perfumed air of the patisseries that lined the street made his mouth water and his stomach lurch, hungry from a night of laying the groundwork to the most dangerous of all games.  She was dangerous, and she'd see through the lie fast enough.  "That would be preferable."

"Do not disappoint me, Mr. Roscoe, and your life is your own to lose."

He rang off, jamming his phone back into his pocket and turning abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk and heading into the nearest open door.  Pausing to leave his cigarette on the windowsill before stepping inside.  He smiled and tugged his phone sheepishly from his pocket.  " _Anglais_?" he asked.

"A bit," the girl replied, accent thick.

"Could I borrow your phone?"  He feigned pressing the button to turn the screen on, pretending the battery is dead.  "No juice."

"Ah, oui."  She turned and collected a cordless phone.  "City only."

"Of course. Merci."

He stepped away to allow the next couple in line access to the counter and dialed the number form memory.  It rang twice before it clicked on.

"Roscoe, you're late."  The rich, cultured male voice on the other end of the line curled like hazy smoke in Roscoe's head.

"Apologies. I had to make my assurances, it took longer than expected."  Roscoe ran a hand over three days’ worth of beard and noticed that there was still blood under his fingernails.  He'd have to scrub it off.  "I believe I have found the solution to your problem."

"Oh?"

"There is a weakness, a child."

The other line was silent, and then a quiet hum of approval could be heard.  "Another, I see. At least this one was allowed to live."

Roscoe remembered the papers he'd left with Mathieu's body.  A pregnancy terminated at seventeen.

"How many bodies are attached to this weakness at present?"

"At least five, possibly more.  A high ranking lieutenant who attempted a coup chief among them."  Roscoe exhaled and glanced over at the girl behind the counter, she was staring at him with expectant eyes.  "I have to go."

"Keep close watch on this situation, Roscoe.  There is a good chance you may need to do the girl before this is done."

"I don't 'do' children, sir."

"I am aware of that, Mr. Roscoe.  We must tread lightly so as to avoid any further embarrassment.  She cannot be allowed to continue."

"Of course."

He handed the girl back her phone and passed over five euros for a cup of café au lait and a ham and cheese croissant.  "Merci, again.  You're a life saver."

The girl watched him go with wide, unblinking eyes.


	8. vii

_ "I hear her voice _

_in the morning hour_

_she calls me"_

 

Joan's fingers shook as she moved to switch out the SIM-card on her phone.  The tension in the room was palpable and strange, Moriarty perched on the arm of the chair on the far side of the hotel room, a black notebook fallen open in her lap and a pen held loosely in her right hand. 

Funny, Joan had never wondered if she was right or left handed before.

She had to call Sherlock, even though she wanted nothing to do with him.

("Don't bother calling him, Joan," Moriarty had said, handing Joan a SIM-card and breezing past her, small suitcase in hand and laptop bag slung over her shoulder. She looked like a business professional, but the outline of the gun holstered at her shoulder was enough to make Joan’s stomach turn violently.  She wanted nothing to do with Jamie Moriarty. Even now that they were both drawn into this investigation and making a living on not being entirely honest with each other.  "He won't answer."

"How would you know?"

Moriarty's eyes were intense, and very, very blue.  Her lips quirked upwards, half a grin half an angry red slash across a face that had no business being so intensely beautiful.  Joan hated that she noticed. She hated so many things about Moriarty in that one moment that they sucked the very air from the room and left her gasping, pulling herself together and concentrating on her ire and her task.  Her fingernails scraped along the back of the smooth surface of her phone case, trying to break into the tangled world of secrets and lied they contained. . 

"It is my business to know."  Moriarty said it with a little quirk of one annoyingly perfect eyebrow and turned away, leaving Joan to fume silently at the back of her head.)

When Sherlock left, he'd done it with a note.  Vanished into nothingness without a word in person.  Moriarty knew that he'd hurt her when he left, twisting the knife of a wound already weeping with his own inability to function as a human in normal human relationships.  There was a great sadness that ruled Joan when she thought about that note, her body slumped down onto the floor of the brownstone, leaning against the couch in the library.  He'd gone and he'd left and when she'd climbed the ladder she'd seen the probable reason why.

When he'd called later to make sure she'd be willing to take care of Clyde Joan had said things to him that she regretted as soon as the phone fell silent cradled to her ear.  Her temper was shorter than ever these days, and while she did not ask and knew that he would not tell her, the fear of what might have been a relapse was all that kept her from letting her phone go straight to voicemail.  She did not want to be that person for Sherlock. She could not, and would not, allow that to happen on her watch.

And so Sherlock had removed himself from her watchful gaze.  Addicts are the only people who can choose to relapse, but she could not help but think that her choice to pull away from him, to bring herself down from the pedestal he put her on time and time again, had something to do with it.  If he was indeed using again.

She'd never met him high, she had no idea what he was like under the influence of his own self-indulgence.

The press of her failure ached within her, and her hands shook as she slid the SIM-card into the back of her phone and clicked the case back into place.

From the window, Moriarty was having none of her introspection. "Watson, you've frozen."

Joan shook her head, closing up the back of her phone with a snap and switching it back on.  "No, I haven't."

Moriarty tapped the back of her pen against her notepad.  There was a knowing look in her eyes that irritated Joan, twisted that knife deeper and made Joan want to storm away and hop a plane back to the US without so much as a glance behind her.  This was a favor for Agent Matoo, a favor for Moriarty even.  She didn't need to be here at all.  Exhaling, Moriarty turned away, got to her feet.  "I'll be just outside."  She indicated the balcony and disappeared through the sliding glass door before Joan could voice a word of protest.

The phone came on a moment later, screen glowing in the dimly lit hotel room.  Joan swiped her thumb the phone screen and dialed Sherlock's London number.  She'd committed it to memory when she'd first gotten it out of him.

Now she stood, thumb hovering over the 'send call' button on the screen, green and inviting.  She had to call him, to tell him what was happening.  Agent Matoo hadn't said anything about what Sherlock did and didn't know, but Joan knew he wouldn't know anything.  Moriarty wouldn't want it to be that way, so it simply would not be so.

The phone rang twice before he picked up.

"You're in Switzerland."

"I am."

"May I inquire as to why or shall I venture a guess?"

Joan set her jaw and shook her head against the annoyance that surged within her.  "Don't bother," she said testily. "There was a bank heist here, I got called in to consult."

She knew what he would be thinking, how fast that brilliant mind of his would jump easily from one assumption to another.  Like Moriarty only in a different light, less amusement more a want to understand.  Joan wasn't sure which was easier to stomach.

"You're with her."

Joan didn't bother to ask how he knew.  She supposed it wasn’t a hard assumption to make.  He surely knew that the US Marshalls had turned Moriarty loose for lack of evidence.  He was working with MI-6, liaising with Interpol.  He'd know what had happened.  Or at least have an idea, even if it was very hush-hush.  "I'm investigating."

"Do you require my presence?"

And it was with all the vindication of a woman abandoned by her best friend that Joan said, very resolutely, "No."

 

Moriarty slept as she lived, tight, poised, ready to strike.  Somehow, Joan was surprised she was sleeping at all.  She drank a glass of wine at the tense dinner they shared where nothing of consequence was said and that was that.  She was asleep before Joan was done in the bathroom, contacts out and a toothbrush hanging from her mouth as she peered owlishly around the bathroom door to take in the sight of a murderess at rest.

She looked so young, so very innocent.  Face and lips and fingertips completely devoid of the blood Joan knew to drench them.  It was odd, really, to picture her as Joan remembered their last encounter.  Blood dripping down her finger tips and a manic gleam in her eye.  This was a woman just out of her twenties and flourishing - not a killer.

But she is a killer, a destroyer of lives.  She takes pleasure in it.

Joan turned and spat into the sink, rinsing off her toothbrush, her stomach twisting into knots.

They had gone back to Laramie Straus following the phone call that Joan had placed to Sherlock.  Moriarty had made a few calls of her own, nothing that seemed particularly consequential. The only one Joan hadn't overheard in its entirety was the call placed out on the balcony while she was still talking to Sherlock.  She'd caught the tail end of that, the cryptic threat was enough to cast Joan fully into suspicion, but Moriarty had an answer that seemed plausible.

"When I was detained a great many of my contracts and business dealings went to other parties.  As news of my release gets out - and coming here did not keep that a secret, Watson - I am likely to be approached by more individuals like that associate.  They want me back in the game, and it is not my interest, currently, reenter the game."

It was a lie, slipping easily from her adder's lips and washing around Joan like a comforting embrace.  She was a fool to ever think that Moriarty was innocent.

"Just tell me that it had nothing to do with this."

Moriarty tilted half-lidded eyes towards Joan, a sly smile at her lips.  "Not directly, no." She'd looked away, gathered herself.  "His name is unimportant, but he has been tasked with watching over the girl."

"She has a name, you know."

"I didn't give it to her."

 

The words resonated in Joan’s head as she followed Moriarty like a silent shadow back downstairs into the lobby and out into the busy side street that the Hotel was located upon.  It smelled like city in the summer, but cleaner than New York.  Most places smelled better than New York, even once you got out to the suburbs.  The air was clear here, or clear enough for Joan’s focus to never waver.  She let Moriarty’s driver open the door for her, and let him close it behind her.  She sat next to Moriarty and stared directly ahead.

“Sherlock does not approve.” Moriarty said. She settled down next to Joan and curled forward, body ready to strike.  Joan watched her move and the tension that was just barely hidden behind her every move was so pliable that Joan could feel it pressing up against her own space and filling her with a myriad of emotions that she had no business having.  “Of this little venture between us.”

“Sherlock doesn’t approve of anything at all when it comes to you.”  The retort fell flat. Moriarty simply inclined her head to the side and regarded Joan thoughtfully.

“He should approve of this.”

“Why?”

“Watson, a girl must have some secrets.”

Joan folded her arms across her chest and let out the sigh of the long-suffering.    She didn’t know why she even bothered.  Moriarty was a game master, Moriarty was the one person that Joan was absolutely certain that she would always match wits with.  She was the one Moriarty had picked as a rival, Sherlock she’d merely destroyed, but Joan?  No, Joan had the odious task of being the one woman that Moriarty found interesting enough to keep alive.

“You can’t do that.  Not if this is gonna work.”  Joan blew air out of her lips and found herself wishing for something to fiddle with.  She was entirely out of her element here, trapped in the back of a car with a mass-murderer.  Agent Matoo wanted this, she reminded herself fiercely.  Agent Matoo seemed to think that this was the way to make sure that no one else died.

But people were already dead.  Interpol had made that exceptionally clear, and would not be so lucky again.

Moriarty was silent, face stony and schooled so carefully blank that Joan found it unnerving to look at for too long.  She turned her attention back to the window, to watching the streets of Geneva as they slowly inched by, caught up in lunch time traffic.

"You want something I cannot give you."  It felt like a gambit, or maybe even a desperation lob at the buzzer.  "This is a game yet, Watson, I cannot give away all the twists and turns of the road we're heading down without something in return."

Joan sat, rigid in her seat.  The seatbelt was digging painfully into her neck and she wanted to push it away.  She didn't though; she stayed with the pain reminding her what was real and what was just more of Moriarty's lies. "What do you want?"

"Your trust that I will handle this matter in the correct way."

She scoffed. "Leave your gun in the car and we'll talk."

Moriarty leaned over, eyes flashing dangerously.  "What would we do then, if someone tries to hurt you?"

Joan shrugged.  "I don't keep many enemies."

With a chuckle, Moriarty pulled her gun from her purse and set it on the seat between them.  "No, you just keep the most dangerous sort."  She folded her hands over the closure of her purse and looked straight ahead.  There was an air of danger about her person, a thinly-veiled threat in the way that she delivered the statement that Joan didn't personally see as true.  Moriarty was not her enemy; Moriarty was the game that Joan was confident that she'd win every time they played each other.

The only question came in finding out the nature of the game before it threatened to overwhelm the truth of the matter.

"Your father banks at Laramie Straus."

"Many people do."

"People who have bank accounts in Switzerland tend to have something to hide."  Joan paused.  "Or obscene amounts of money."  She tilted her head to one side.  "You came from money."

"I did."  There was no lie in Moriarty's voice.  "I found I liked it far more than my father ever did - I'm gifted with numbers."

"I know."  Joan ran a tired hand through her hair.  "Look, I know that this cannot be comfortable for you, having your secrets and your mother's things stolen, but is there any chance this has anything to do with you in the first place?"

"I don't follow."  She did, that much was obvious, but she wanted Joan, in her careful skirting of the topic, to cut to the chase.  Moriarty's tone was evidence enough of that wish.

"What is the likelihood that you are simply a victim of convince in this heist?"

They locked eyes and Moriarty looked away.  A lie of omission.  She glanced down at the gun between them and Joan caught herself watching long eyelashes and hair that fell into her face with enough innocence to make Moriarty look younger than she was.  The lines were already appearing around her eyes, hate aged faster than happiness, and greed aged the fastest of all sins.

Moriarty turned and stared out the window.  The rest of the ride was silent.

 

Laramie Straus following the lunch hour was quiet.  They were allowed a conference room on the second floor to work in, and left alone while the relevant documents and Mr. Perrin were collected.  Joan tilted her head back and stared at the high ceiling and walls all done up in dark wood.  It gave the place a severe and masculine look.   Joan reached out to touch the cool wood, such a contrast to the temperature outside, and let out the breath she didn't realize she'd been holding.

Moriarty stood at the window, fingers poised on the sill, her expression carefully neutral.  Joan watched her with narrowed eyes, bathed in light and cutting a commanding figure in the shadow of the late afternoon sun.  She looked like a savior come to make the world a better place, a white knight.  Bile rose up in Joan’s throat and she looked away.  She couldn’t be so naive.

Something more was happening here.  Something dark and threatening.  It flitted at the corners of Joan’s consciousness, telling her that she should push for more, push for why Moriarty agreed to do this, why insert herself into the investigation when she probably had something to do with the heist in the first place. 

Joan wasn’t stupid.  That call to her associate and the barely veiled threat had been allowed to be overheard, to raise the stakes of Moriarty’s game to a level that Joan wasn’t sure she was ready for.  This wasn’t like their other games.  There was more at stake now.  A secret they both knew could never get out.

“Did you know that they’d double cross you when you planned this?”

Moriarty looked up sharply, her eyes narrowed and the color of ice at midwinter.  She looked angry, her entire body contorting from the poised young woman to the killer Joan knew her to be.  Her entire body seemed coiled, tight, ready to strike at any moment.  Joan was reminded of how she looked asleep, ready to tear her enemies to shreds.  Her lip curled and Joan fought the instinctive urge she felt in her gut to step back and get out of the way of this woman, this force of nature that she knew could never be tamed. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The pieces clicked into place, and Joan swallowed nervously before she stepped forward and stood on one side of the large, overly-ornate conference table that dominated the space between them.  “You’re penniless in your trade. You gave away all your secrets and you had this planned for _years._ ”

“I have been locked up for the better part of the past year, Watson.”

“Except for that one day.”

“I had other things on my mind that day.  A bank heist when a child’s life is at stake seems somehow… less dire, don’t you think?”

“I think you don’t give a shit about that girl beyond the obvious weakness she exposes in you.”  Joan looked away.  Her anger was directed at Moriarty, because she saw it all now.  Saw how easily Moriarty had lied to Malphrus and hated herself for being played the fool.  “That girl was a mistake.”

And then Moriarty did a curious thing:  In the light of the window she looked away and out over the street and buildings, her eyes were closed, her expression carefully blank.  Joan watched her as she seemed to gather herself, puling herself to her full height, standing taller than even her obscenely expensive shoes made her.  “No.” Moriarty’s voice was quiet, full of a secret, and yet unnamed hurt.  “She was not a mistake.”


	9. viii

The silence in the room rang out – a cacophony of the ringing that so characterized the absolute absence of sound.  Joan swallowed, stepped forward, fingers curling around the edges of the conference table that separated them.  She wanted to say that no one like Moriarty would ever bring a child willingly into this world, but she did not like the implication of victimhood that it placed on Moriarty.  Moriarty was no victim, and she never would be, even at her absolute lowest.  There was more to this, more than the biting harshness of Joan’s pronouncement and the gentleness of Moriarty’s hurt.  There was more.  There had to be more.

Joan opened her mouth to speak.  She wanted to demand that Moriarty explain herself, even though she knew that that hope was a fool’s dream.  Moriarty kept her secrets and kept them well.  Joan would discover the truth when she was ready to share it and not a moment sooner.  There was something oddly comforting in that fact, a careful parsing of information that was relevant and that alone.  Joan embraced that mindset, for it was only through Moriarty’s careful exclusion of information that she was able to come to this conclusion.

Her life felt as though it had been thrown into chaos since Sherlock left, even if the exact opposite was true.  Sherlock was the chaos, he brought Joan into his tangle of emotional torment and the aftermath of abuse at the hands of the very woman that Joan had come to understand that she must trust with her life in order for this enterprise to succeed.

“Mr. Perrin should be in soon.”  Moriarty looked down, boredom affected clearly on her features.  Joan could see no break in the façade, no cracks like the one of the admission of the importance of that little girl.  They were gone and replaced with the woman that Joan had come to know and come to fear: the monster that was Jamie Moriarty. “Best avoid discussing such matters.”

Turned, eyes rolling and biting back the urge to retort sarcastically about the sheer inconvenience of this whole affair to Moriarty.  Moriarty, after all, was not exactly expecting Joan to show up on her doorstep with a request from Agent Matoo to assist with this investigation. 

“This discussion isn’t over.”

“Of course it isn’t, Watson, you’re far too bull-headed to let something like this drop.”

“Did you orchestrate Gaspar’s involvement as well?”

“ _No._ ” There was such force behind the word that Joan instantly regretting asking.  There was no reason to even ask, Joan already knew the answer, yet the vindictive urge in her to needle at Moriarty was too great.  And the force of the reaction made it worth it.

This was the peeling back of layers upon layers of careful defense to find herself faced with the unpleasant truth.  Moriarty did care, and the sheer humanity of that moment was enough to make Joan reel with the implication of it all.

She was saved the trouble of having to counter the dismissal of her needling by the door pushing open and the round cheeks and small glasses of Perrin appearing on the opposite of the door.  He looked as nervous as before, fidgeting with the sheaf of papers in his hands and sweating despite the coolness of the conference room.  The unseasonably warm temperature of the outside seemed distant in this cool and quiet space that smelled of cedar and old money.

"Mlle. Moriarty." Perrin made his way across the room, completely ignoring Joan and offering her his hand.  The exchange held Joan's attention, as Moriarty took his hand and shook it firmly.  There was none of the good humor in her eyes that Joan was accustomed to seeing, just icy blue and a cold smile.  "I've put together an assessment of your missing assets-"

Moriarty's voice was as cold as her demeanor.  "That is fine, Mr. Perrin, but I am fully aware of the assets that have gone missing. I am more interested in finding out who took my things than their worth."

 _You took them._ Joan thought darkly. _Or your goons took them as a way to fuck with you._

Perrin tugged at the collar of his shirt where it cut into his fat neck.  "Madame, I cannot allow you into the vault to inspect the damages so easily.  There are bank protocols."

"I'm sure," Moriarty replied smoothly.  She stepped forward and somehow, despite being considerably shorter than Perrin, loomed over him. She sucked all the warmth from the room, and Joan shivered despite herself. "You have not contacted the authorities beyond the initial report, Mr. Perrin. No one has come to investigate, which speaks volumes as to the nature of what was stolen from the other patrons of this bank.  Secrets, powerful ones at that, are kept within these walls. If you would like to avoid a scandal, you'd best do what I say. I would like to see the vault.  Now."

"You ask too much." Perrin half stumbled backwards, pudgy thighs hitting the conference table as he backed up.  "I cannot--"

"You will."  Moriarty said shortly.  Her gaze slid from Perrin to Joan, cold and full of icy venom.  "Doctor-" and she drew out Joan's former title like an insult "-Watson and myself are discrete.  I can make no promises of justice for your burgled bank, but I can assure you that I will find out who did this."

Perrin spluttered, mouth opening and shutting like a beached fish.  Finally, what felt like an eternity later, Moriarty's lip curled into a self-satisfied smile and Perrin lowered his head in acquiescence.

 

The safes in the bank vault were not numbered.  The detail stuck out to Joan, a neon warning sign in the great gray expanse of the vault.  Gone were the ostentatious trappings of the bank above.  All that remained were the stripped bare walls that Joan was certain were made of stone and steel.  Ugly florescent lights lit the vault, casting the pair of them in a harsh, almost green light.

"How did you do it?" Joan asked.

Moriarty turned then, hair green and eyes dark in the light of the vault.  "How did I do what?"

"Orchestrate all of this?" Joan gestured to the blank faces of the vaults.

She shrugged.  "I suppose if I did want to rob this particular bank that I would have had to have this plan in reserve for a rather long time, wouldn't I?"  Moriarty walked by one of the walls of safes, fingers trailing along the gun-gray metal.  "Although, if I had done this I never would have chosen a bank that I myself used, or that was even remotely connected to my family."

"Rookie mistake?"

"Amateurish at best."

"Then who did it?"

"There are only a few men in the world would could crack this many safes in such a short time period."  Moriarty pushed one of the safe doors back shut with a finger, as if debating the whole ordeal.  "The man they found dead in Paris is one of them.  He usually works with others, not alone.  This is far too elaborate a heist for him to have pulled alone."

"Then what were they after?"

"Where are we, Watson?"

Joan blinked.  "Uh, Geneva?"

"Exactly.  Swiss banks are notoriously good at keeping secrets and blood money.  Someone was after secrets, I'd wager..."

"Someone who isn't you?"

"I am hardly the only information broker in the world, Joan.  I just happen to be the best."

"Modesty doesn’t suit you."

 

Investigating with Moriarty was actually a fairly enlightening experience for Joan.  She had seen the flashes of her skill as an investigator during Kayden Fuller's kidnapping, but for some reason, Joan had never thought that she was anything other than play acting in that moment.  She'd wanted to get inside Joan's head, into Sherlock's head, and pull the wool over their eyes.

Now though, combing through the vault beneath Laramie Straus, Moriarty was more than proving to Joan that all that bluster about her intelligence and her abject lack of modesty were not just for show.

Over the course of an hour, barbed comments of their entrance were put aside and Moriarty systematically moved through the vault, taking careful pictures of each of the safes, documenting what remained with a precision that reminded Joan far too starkly of Sherlock to leave her feeling anything other than decidedly unsettled.

Moriarty was up to something.  It was just a matter of pressing for the information in the right way.

"Was this your backup?"

Nose deep in what looked like a folder full of ancient stock and bond certificates, Moriarty let out a quiet humming noise. It wasn't a confirmation, but interestingly, it was not a denial either.

"My father," Moriarty began.  Joan held her breath, standing stock still over by the table, notepad full of a hodge-podge of their combined notes on the vault before her.  The pen tumbled limply where her fingertips has gripped it to the yellow lined surface of the page.  "Has always banked at Laramie Straus."

"I wasn’t aware that your father was alive."  Joan picked up the pen and made a note of the stocks left behind - considerable value, mostly South American companies.  Moriarty stood next to her, leaning back against the table, fingers in bright blue gloves curled around its edge.  She looked so young, standing there, hair tinged green in the harsh light overhead.  Joan was struck, staring at her, wondering if this too was just another of Moriarty's masks.

"That is entirely by design.  I did not wish for anyone to know."  Her tone was light, conversational but Joan could see the hesitance to share this information.  It was this nervousness, the twitch of her lips and slight furrowing of her brow that had Joan on edge.  Why was Moriarty unwilling to share this?  Everyone comes from somewhere, even monsters like Moriarty.

Perhaps it was Joan's want to make a monster out of the woman before her that made it so easy to accept.

"So you brought your things here because your father trusted them?"

"It was the last place on earth anyone would think to look."

"Anyone being your father."  Joan set the stocks aside, slipping them into a bag with their owners name carefully written in sharpie on the label.

Moriarty said nothing for a long time, her lips pursed into a thin line of annoyance.  She pushed away from the table, heels clicking on the polished stone floor of the vault.  She moved towards the door, fingers flexing as if itching for the gun that Joan had insisted be left behind.

"This was a backup of a backup, a redundancy that I'd built never thinking I'd need it."  Moriarty's chin was raised, striking, defiant.  "Gaspar did not act alone.  Oh, he may have pretended the whole thing was his idea, but he is not nearly clever enough to pull off something so complex."  Her expression turned dark, harsher in the odd light of the vault.  “And then there is the matter of where he got his information. “

There was a moment then, Joan’s fingers curling around the top of the bag, crinkling the seal.  She met Moriarty’s gaze evenly, not shying away from the murder that was so obviously coloring her every word.  There was something else here, she knew that.  Moriarty was admitting too much, showing more cards that Joan would have expected of her, and it was all though a strangely heart-felt confession.

“You told Sherlock that it was probably your former lover who let it slip.”

“Can’t be. He’s been dead for years now.”  Moriarty tilted her head to one side, all private amusement at Joan’s barely concealed flinch away from her.  _Murderer_ , Joan’s mind screamed. _Murderer_.  “Did you really think I was going to let someone with that many of my secrets in his back pocket walk away?”  She looked down at her fingernails.  “It wasn’t me who did him though.  It was the police Washington.  He ran when he should have stayed.  They put two bullets in him, saved me the trouble, I suppose.”

Joan sat numb, digesting this information.  There was something not right, something that didn’t fit.  Moriarty wasn’t a murderer in this instance, but it didn’t meant she wasn’t one.  “Then who?”

“My father has never taken well to my motherhood.”

“Your father?”

“Of course Joan, you were a doctor, you know how babies are made.  Everyone has a mother and a father.  It’s the relationship you have with them that counts.”

“And yours?”

Moriarty’s lips drew into a thin line and she looked away, moving back out into the vault and pausing before a safe that Joan hadn’t noticed before.  She twisted the combination lock once, twice, and then three times, before inserting a lock pick produced from her pocket into the lock and twisting it around.  The safe open with a loud click and Moriarty withdrew a long narrow metal box.  She stood with it in her hands for a moment before crossing over to the desk and setting it down on top of Joan’s notes, thumb pressing on the clip lock open and pulling out a sheaf of papers.

“My father works for Interpol, it is non-existent.”


	10. ix

_"I'm building an empire_

_I'm building with my body and soul"_

The hotel room was quiet, plunged into the half-darkness of twilight and filtered through half-closed venetian blinds.  Joan sat on the edge of one of the two small beds, cross-legged and a stack of papers in her lap. She was putting a great deal of effort into concentrating on the task at hand, and ignoring the nagging, almost desperate need to press her companion for answers.

They left the bank at the height of the rush hour and had walked, unhurried, back to the hotel.  Joan was dazed during their meander, trying to process the information that Moriarty had pulled out of the vault and presented to her, absolute proof of her innocence.   She barely paid attention to Moriarty's chatter about the city, about the time that she'd spent there.  She was trying to be impressive, to make Joan stop thinking about the paperwork she been forced to read in order to fully understand what they were butting up against.

"I was thinking we could go out, tonight," Moriarty suggested from the desk at the far corner of the room.  She was making notes, expanding on Joan's own careful documentation of what they'd seen.  "I know a wonderful place--"

"Your father works for Interpol."

Moriarty's blithe smile shifted into something dark, a smear across her face that made Joan want to recoil and retreat to the head of the bed. There was a malevolent force that existed within Moriarty, and Joan found herself skirting it, abutting it without meaning to, over and over again.

She should have never agreed to do this.

"I shared that regrettable detail with you for a reason, Joan, not to have you staring at me, some three hours later, utterly flabbergasted by it.  Your father is a vagrant, my father works in law enforcement; so what?"

Bristling at the mention of her own father, and even more annoyed that Sherlock had apparently not found it within himself to hold that particular detail back (because really: how else could she have possibly known?), Joan sucked in a deep breath of air to keep the anxiety and fear from her voice. "You're implying that he's involved this by even mentioning him."

Moriarty was silent for a long time, hands folded before her, fingers absolutely still.  It was odd to see her so still, so utterly impassive when Joan had only ever known her to be as fidgety as Sherlock.  She just hid it better, behind grandiose gestures and a bravado that surely had to be faked at least half of the time.  "If he's found out about the girl, then he is involved."

"Most men are happy to discover that they have grandchildren."

"My father is not most men."

"Does he not want you to be a mother?"

"I am not a mother."

"You know what I mean."

"There is a distinction Joan, and it is an important one to make.  Whatever part I had in that girl's life was meant to end on the day I gave birth.  Her reappearance in my life, especially at the hands of one such as Devon Gaspar begs the question of why.  This heist is meant to be a frame-up, that much is clear.  To implicate me but also to ascertain what Gaspar said was true.  Those records include the birth."  Moriarty glanced down at her notes and set the pen aside.  "My father only found out I was still alive when you started to meddle in my affairs, Joan."

Joan blew air out of her nostrils and ran a hand through her hair.  "That still doesn't answer my question.  What did you father do to you to make you think he wouldn't embrace Kayden Fuller as his biological granddaughter?"

Moriarty said nothing.

 

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The pen in Joan's hand moved up and down on the page, the blunt cap on it making small indentations on the thin yellow note paper.  She was thinking, and thinking hard.  The clues didn't add up.  There was a secret the size of an elephant in the room that she didn't know how to broach.  Moriarty had shared the detail for a reason, there had to be one.  This was a clue in a bigger puzzle.

It was a meditative exercise, to run over the details of that sheaf of papers she'd overlooked.  She doesn't dare pull out her phone and try and google Moriarty's father.  She isn't even sure that he'll come up if he does, or if it will be a situation like Sherlock's convoluted alert system that lets him know if people are trying to find out information about his past on the Internet.  It was best to stick to pen and paper and the murder board in her mind.

Only this time there was no body save the long-dead one of Clemence D'Ory and another far off in Paris that was one of their would-be thieves.

Moriarty had gone out, alone, to ostensibly fetch the evening papers.  She was making a phone call, or perhaps several, that she did not want Joan to overhear. Joan had a niggling suspicion that her reluctance for an audience had more to do with the way that her eyes had narrowed and her expression had turned all closed-off and dark upon a closer examination of some of the documents left behind in the robbery.

If Joan didn't think the idea was preposterous, she'd suspect that Moriarty had been behind the whole thing and that she'd been double-crossed by her people.  It would not be the first time she'd been involved in such a mop-up duty.

The pieces were not adding up.  Moriarty's father should have welcomed a grandchild, even from such a dangerous mother.  Joan wondered what sort of a relationship Moriarty had with the man, and if perhaps it was that poor relationship that had Moriarty had looked so concerned.

From her purse beside her on the bed, Joan's phone buzzed.  She ignored it, not wanting to talk to anyone, but it continued to ring and ring insistently.  With a frustrated groan, Joan leaned over and unearthed her phone, staring at the display and wanting to throw the phone away with disgust.  Instead she bit her tongue and slid her thumb over the screed to answer.  "What?"

"I have information on your case."  Sherlock sounded just as reluctant to speak to her as Joan did to him.  She didn't want his help, not after how he'd left, and her mouth was halfway open to saying just that when his next question hit her where it counted and she had no chance to recover. "Have you got a pen?"

"Yes."

"There's a man there in Geneva, or at least he was there until very recently.  His name is William Roscoe." Sherlock sucked in a breath of air.  "You need to find him, away from her.  He's the key to all this."

"I didn't want you to get involved.  I didn't want your help."

"This isn't from me, Joan," he retorted.  "I have been asked to play a messenger for a superior here who wanted this passed along."

"Does that superior have a name?"

Sherlock said nothing.

Joan switched tactics.  Two years of working together had told her when Sherlock was being evasive and when he simply did not know an answer.  It was an annoying sort of guessing game that Joan had no patience for, but she knew better than to ignore information like this.

There was a niggling suspicion too, if this was what Moriarty suspected it was, a war between family.  "Is he high up in Interpol?"

"I am not even sure that he is indeed male."

"Then why send me after this Roscoe guy?  For all you know it could be another one of her games!"  Joan glanced towards the door, silent and immovable.  Moriarty was still gone, but she turned away from the door and added in a hissed undertone.  "You of all people know what she's capable of doing to people she supposedly cares about."

He let out a frustrated, quiet sound.  Joan knew that he was trying, that he was as hurt as her by what had happened with Mycroft and her own foolishness.  Her hand shook as she pushed the pen's nib against the pad in her lap.  She wanted to scribble out the name, to blur out Sherlock's advice and forget it was offered.

"I should not have called."

And it took all that Joan had to hold back her biting remark of reprimand back.  She wanted nothing to do with him after what he'd done, not when the wound was still so raw and their partnership was in shambles about their feet.

"I guess not," she said at length.

Sherlock was silent for a spell, and Joan could see him in her mind's eye: fiddling with a paper in his hands, twisting a paperclip into some new and interesting shape, doing calculus just to pass the time where he could not find the words to speak.

"Please be careful around her.  This does not ... and I hesitate to assign this term because a gut feeling is not an accurate assessment of a threat, but I urge you to be careful Joan.  Something is off about this.  It stinks of crookedness and collusion."

Joan ran a tired hand through her hair and winced when she encountered a snarl.  She tugged at it, smoothing it flat and sighed heavily.  "I will be," she promised.  It was the sort she was sure to break.  "She has a plan, I'm sure of it.  I'll figure it out and keep you informed."

"This is your case, Joan, you didn't want me butting in."

"But you did, so here we are.  I'll look at Roscoe; can you email me the dossier that I'm sure you've received?"

"I already did."

"Of course..."  Joan let out a tired laugh and said her good-byes.  She was still hurt, still angry and still raw from what he'd done to her.  They needed space from each other, but just hearing his voice renewed the ache in her heart.

She sat with her phone in her hands for a moment, staring at it and wishing she could call him back, air her grievances.  She wanted to yell, to scream at him until he understood what he'd done.  He'd left her there, scarred and traumatized. Mycroft had let a man be killed while he held a gun to her head.  Mycroft had let all of this happen and Joan had caught herself looking for shadows within shadows, ghosts within ghosts.

There was no Moriarty to save her then.  She didn't even know if Moriarty would play the avenging angel, using a knife to cut the throat of one who'd wronged her to the point where there was little left but the spine that held the skull in place.

"I would appreciate it if you ceased contact with Sherlock for a while." Moriarty had come in silently, a shadow in the night.  She dropped a small bag and a a copy of both the Ledger and the Times onto Joan's lap.  Joan flipped the papers aside, carefully covering her notes, an action that was meant to appear casual but did not escape Moriarty's scrutiny.  She stepped forward, reaching for Joan's notes.  "He's fed you a name, hasn't he?"

Caught and not wanting to foster an environment that would encourage lying, Joan nodded. "William Roscoe." She picked her phone and navigated to her email app.  "He sent over a dossier."

"Don't bother, I've had dealings with him in the past."  Moriarty's face was perfectly indifferent.  "He is an interesting choice for a thief."

"How so?"

Moriarty shrugged, backing away and giving Joan the space to breathe once more.  "Did Sherlock say where he'd gotten the name?"

"No..."  Joan trailed off, but realized she had to recover and explain the situation better.  "Or rather, he didn't expand beyond someone above him asked that it be passed on."

"Well," Moriarty began.  Her hands were plunged into her pockets and her face turned away from Joan.  Joan caught herself wondering why Moriarty's usually piercing gaze was not fixated on her, trying to unsettle her as Moriarty liked to try. There was something more going on here, something that Joan felt like a twisting in her navel, anxiety mounting and terrible catastrophe just around the corner.  "I would like to know why someone to use Sherlock to distribute information that could just as easily be provided in person."

The pieces slid into place. "Your father."

"Mn."  She turned then, and Joan caught sight of the maelstrom of emotion that drifted, unhidden across Moriarty's face.  Joan had seen that look before, directed at her, and at the sound of Devon Gaspar's voice.  "Which begs the question of why he saw it fit to use Sherlock to pass on information to you."

Joan said nothing, thinking.  She didn't know anything about the man, but she knew who fathers who did not love their children worked.  She'd seen it in Sherlock's father, in so many of their cases.  "He wants me to be the one to point the finger at you.  For this."

She won't rule out the possibility that Moriarty concocted this whole thing as an elaborate ruse to hide her true intention.  This had all the hallmarks of one of her schemes, but this piece, the offer of a culprit was not Moriarty's style.  Moriarty liked to leave no traces, to leave people in awe or unaware of what she'd done.

This was a vindictive act, or at least one that was made with the intent of that.  Someone had wanted for Moriarty to suffer, to slip-up and to be blamed for what had happened at Laramie Straus.  That much was obvious.  There was a niggling sensation, however, of something not quite fitting.  Moriarty could have so easily committed this crime, Joan knew that.

"Why did you leave your documents at this particular bank?"

Moriarty looked away, towards the half-closed blinds and the window.  She looked so angry, so small, and yet Joan could see the tension across her shoulders.  Admissions like this were not easy for anyone, Joan herself struggled with them, and the idea of playing into Moriarty's habit of turning her into a 'dearest enemy mine' was not appeasing.

"They are a contingency.  I have many."

"How many are fake and how many are real?"  Joan picked up her pen once more.  "How many more banks have the potential to be robbed?"

"None."  And she said it with such certainty that Joan looked up from the notepad in her lap.  Moriarty was looking at her again, her face softened from a twisted knot of pure hatred to something that could perhaps only be described as a sneering stripe of malice.  Either way, it was not exactly appealing. "This was the bank he wanted." Moriarty let out a quiet breath of air, a sigh maybe, or perhaps just an exhalation laced with frustration.  "My father has remade his life from the time when I was a child.  They used to think him rather mad."

"Is he?  Mad, I mean."  It was not the turn of phrase that Joan herself would use.  She'd spent too much time amongst the mentally ill to use such a dated term.

"He's far too gregarious for such a diagnosis." Moriarty contemplated her fingernails for a moment.  "But his entire world is poised on a knife's edge.  People see him as successful, yes, a family man who overcame great tragedy and remade his life.  It's all a lie though, a sham front put on by a person who has far too much comprehension of such things and very little practical application."

Joan bit her lip and stared down at her notes.  Next to William Roscoe's name was a list of characteristics that she would also assign to her companion, to Sherlock, maybe even to herself in her moments of brutal self-reflection.  She still failed to understand the fear here or the potential motivation why.  It all just seemed like Moriarty's usual smoke and mirrors.  There was no truth.

"Why go after her then?"

"Because she represents a deconstruction of his perfect lie, Joan.  The same threat that I pose, she poses."  Moriarty's heal tilted back, hair falling across her face and making her look so young that that was caught, wondering what could have driven a girl like that start to murder in the first place.  "We're spawn of his first marriage, a culmination of madness and strife and all the lies he's had to tell since."

"Your mother is dead."

"She is, locked in a wing of the old estate before she threw herself from a balcony when I was eleven."  Moriarty recited the story as if reading from an obituary, with no emotion or feeling what so ever.  Joan was beginning to think that whatever her father had must run in the family, because this level of emotional detachment was making her skin crawl. "My father never loved her, just her money.  He was willing to play the nursemaid and let the die fall where they were cast, give her family some semblance of normalcy."

Joan looked up sharply, hand stilled. "He raped her then. If she needed constant care there is no wa---"

"It doesn't matter, Joan.  She's dead.  The dead have the sleep of eons to recover from their pains in life."

"Then why come after you?"

"Because I know what he did, Joan.  And with a word I could undo him."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many thanks to alex for providing read-through services and sound advice.


	11. x

Heathrow was crowded for a Tuesday in the waning days of June.  Roscoe sucked moodily on a cigarette outside the main entrance, waiting on the car that was promised to him.  The sky above was remarkably clear, and so blue he felt as though he could lose himself in it.  Smoke curled around his head and he scowled down at his watch.  The car was late and he was lost in a haze of insecurity and memory, trapped between wanting to know the best possible outcome to this visit and knowing he was a fool for even coming here.

He’d been summoned.  He knew where his employer was right now, in Geneva pretending to be a fine upstanding citizen, as was the plan.  The problem was that the plan was falling apart and his employer had no idea.  Or maybe, by now, that would have become obvious.

Roscoe was running.  He’d taken the summons when it had been offered in Paris and he’d come without question.  He wasn’t a fool, after all, he knew that it was only a matter of time before the wrath that had so mimed Gaspar rained down upon him as well.  He should have known better than to test the waters of this game.  It wasn't smart to go toe to toe with is employer.  They'd all seen what had happened to Gaspar.

Mathieu was dead and with his demise left the one chance Roscoe had had of getting out of this without being implicated in the double-cross.  He'd seen too much in that file, he'd dared to ask questions.

M was terrifying, a force of nature to be reckoned with at such a juncture in their business relationship.  Roscoe cursed himself again and again for playing the fool, for tripping his way into a plot far older than time innumerous.  Even now, at the very precipice of his doom, Roscoe could feel the weight of his employer's wrath bearing down on him.  It was a sharp ache between his shoulder blades, a terrifying hitch in his breath that he could not control, the racing of his blood, pulsing through his veins.

Roscoe lit another cigarette.

He sucked in smoke, exhaling a hazy cloud up at the clear blue sky and cursed his luck.  He'd been hard up, caught on another job, and sitting in lock-up when the email instructions had come to his phone.  His phone that, at the time, had been sitting on the desk of the very man he was now set to visit.

"This is a clever code," he'd been told.  "Pity it is so easy to decipher once you have the key."  It had been said with the manic sort of smile that Roscoe remembered from his one meeting with Gaspar.  He'd smiled like that, on the phone pretending to be their shared employer.  He'd toyed with the man on the other line, feeding him lines, leading him in, drawing him towards his unmaking.

And yet, somehow, Gaspar was the one who'd ended up unmade.

The man at Interpol had been perfectly put together, clad all in black with not a hair out of place.  There was an uneasy feeling about him, seeping into Roscoe's bones.  It was in the way he spoke: every word measured and concise, weighed for intent and carefully stripped of all hidden meanings.  It was unnerving, looking into the man's eyes and taking him at his word.  He was hiding something, and Roscoe wasn't sure he wanted to know he wanted to know what it was.

A black sedan pulled up before him, and Roscoe flicked his cigarette away and hitched his duffle up his back.  He was armed, a well-placed package from an associate underneath the toilet in the men's loo at baggage claim, but it did not make him feel any safer as a tall, dark-skinned man emerged from the car and raised a hand in greeting.

"Are you Mr. Roscoe?"

He nodded.

"Good." The driver circled to the passenger side of the car and opened the door for him.  "Get in, he's waiting."

The he was a man of many names and as many faces.  A master investigator, a brilliant force and the gem of Interpol.  He could destroy Roscoe in a second, he had enough connections to Scotland Yard and other law enforcement across the countries that Roscoe had made his career in law breaking.

Roscoe swallowed nervously and got into the car.

 

He knew that the family had money, or had come into it.  Those details were shaky and Roscoe's few probes had come back with very little information on the family beyond the accounts at Laramie Straus and the property they held in the country.  He knew nothing of the house that the driver pulled up in front of, one in a row and perfectly preserved: a relic of Victorian architecture.

Roscoe got out of the car and followed the driver up the front steps, where he was delivered into the care of a grim-faced footman clad, like the man himself had been on their first meeting, all in black.

The house itself was dark.  There were cobwebs in the corners and large white sheets covered much of the furniture in the rooms whose doors stood open and drapes were pulled tightly closed.  Dust filtered in through the few windows where the drapes stood open, filing the hallway Roscoe was being led down with an eerie sort of light that set his jaw tightly clenched.  His gun dug into the small of his back, and he hoped to god that he was not going to have to shoot his way out of this place.

The footman paused beside a door and knocked once.  Roscoe could smell the cheap cologne on him and winced, nose wrinkling.  This man, with his slicked-back hair and hardened expression, was not Interpol.  No he was private security, playing a role in such a societal location that he must have stood out like a sore thumb.

"Enter," came a voice from beyond the door.  It rang out crisp and clear in the silence of the house and Roscoe's ears resonated with the sound as the silence swallowed the words once more.  The footman pushed the door open and Roscoe stepped inside, to face the man who'd paid him to betray the one individual who scared him more than this man.

"Mr. Roscoe."  From behind an imposing mahogany desk, completely swathed in shadows, the voice boomed.  Roscoe stood with his hands relaxed at his sides, trying to keep his breathing even.  The last time he'd been in this man's presence he'd been offered his life in exchange for information and the laying of a trap.  He'd laid it, now he wanted out.

He coughed, shifted forward, back straight like they'd like when he was in school. "Sir."

The man leaned forward, one silvery slip of graying blonde hair falling into his piercing eye.  He reached up, fingers shaking slightly, and pushed it back into the perfectly gelled mess on top of his head.  His lips curled into a half smirk and he bridged his fingers, resting them almost against his small nose.   "I understand that we are at something of an impasse.  You would like your fee for collecting the information, but I would like you to complete the task assigned."

"She knows that her records have gone missing."  The man's lip curled and the light hit his eyes in such a way that they shone almost black.   Roscoe had to fight every urge he had to take a step back.  "And seems to think that Mathieu was behind it."

"Is that so...?"  Getting to his feet, the man stepped into the light from the open window, and Roscoe finally was able to get a good look at him.  He had never seen the man standing.  He was tall with the same aristocratic features that Roscoe had come to admire about his employer. His hair was graying, slicked back and every strand was carefully placed.

There was something about him, an affected quality of normalcy. The smile that he flashed in Roscoe's direction as he crossed to the window was just that.  Empty, expressionless, a movement of facial muscles to convey an ideal that was not felt in the slightest.  Roscoe wondered if it was meant to be intimidating, but as the man stood, carefully positioning himself so that the light filtered off of one side of his face and cast the other into shadow, Roscoe knew that there was no meaning behind it at all.  It was simply what was expected.  "Why have you told her it was Mathieu?"

"Because I don't want to end up like any of the others who've dared cross her."  He shook his head and took a step away from the man, into the darkness so as better to see the man.  "You saw what she did to her lieutenant."

"Mr. Gaspar, yes.  I heard all about him from my source.  Clever fellow, too bad his goals were entirely too lofty."  The man tapped his chin.  "Though I must say he had the right idea.  Take the child away from the mother and see how she reacts."

"She gutted Gaspar, damn near cut his head off."

"I'd hate to have the same thing happen to you, Mr. Roscoe.  Do take care that she does not catch you in a lie."

Roscoe rubbed at the back of his head.  "Look," he began.  "I know that you want this for your own reasons, but doesn't Interpol already have her, by rights?"

The man's gaze hardened.  "There is no evidence, but that is not the goal of this pursuit."

Realization dawned on Roscoe and he felt sick to his stomach. "You want the girl gone."

The smile that blossomed across his companion's face was like a smear of malice and cruelty.  He'd seen that look before, as the woman who could only be his daughter took to the task of creating a man's downfall in the look of a single, perfect woman.

He had to get out of there.  And fast.  Before he was made to do something he could not do. "With all due respect, I don't do children.  Or women."  He threw out the last bit in case the man wanted him to go after his employer.  He would sooner put a bullet in his own brain than engage her in her own game.

"Then we have a problem, Mr. Roscoe.  Both of them must be eliminated."  The sneer was gone, replaced by a gaze of such intensity that Roscoe knew he would be vomiting as soon as he got out of here. "They can undo this.  All of this. With just the blood in their veins they can achieve such ruin as the world has never seen."

Twenty minutes later, when Roscoe had finished heaving his lunch into the shrubs outside the row house, a clock started ticking in his head.  A countdown until his own death.  He was caught, trapped between two forces that could not be stopped on their collision course.

Soon, Roscoe knew, all that would be left of him were particles and dust in the sunlit air.


	12. xi

_"Your blood's as good an ink as any..."_

Moriarty came in like a thief in the night, phone clutched to her ear and utterly disregarding the fact that Joan was apparently asleep once Joan shifted to unearth her head from the pillow and glare at the interruption of the silence.

She spoke in low, urgent tones and when Joan sleepily sat up, she seemed to start, before settling once more. A smile, one that didn't reach her eyes, drifted across her lips and she turned away, unlocking and sliding open the balcony door before stepping outside and out of earshot.

She'd been gone half the night.

Joan leaned over and turned on the bedside light, picking up her phone and scanning through Amazon coupons and a statement from the bank before clicking into an email with no subject from Sherlock. Inside there was a few lines of his indecipherable shorthand (she'd look at it later) and an attached photo. The photo was interesting, grainy, from a security camera. A man standing before a customs officer, handing over a fairly generic EU passport. He looked familiar, but Joan could not place his face.

She flopped back onto the pillows, one arm flung over her forehead and stared at the picture. Sherlock must have thought that it was important, but even the email did not indicate why. It seemed a foolish thing to do, but when Moriarty slipped back in the sliding balcony door some ten minutes later looking blank but grimly annoyed, Joan held out her phone. "Do you know who that is?" she asked.

Moriarty took the phone, eyebrows narrowing slightly in confusion, before her face was schooled perfectly neutral once more. "Roscoe cut his hair and shaved his beard," she commented. "I liked him better with a beard." She passed Joan back her phone.

Joan glanced down at the picture once more. "Really, that’s him? How can you tell?" She wondered if she would get a straight answer out of Moriarty. They were so hard to come by that it felt almost Sisyphean to attempt to discern where the lies ended and the truth began. She had to know, so much of this was predicated on lies.

"Regrettably, yes. The photos that Sherlock sent you in that dossier did not do him justice. Look at the eyes." Moriarty sat on the edge of Joan's bed, bending to begin to pull her shoes from her feet. High stilettos, the sort that Joan would only ever wear to a club or when she wanted to get laid. They made her seem bigger, somehow, and her removing them was a return to earth. The raw, red skin on the backs of her ankles was a reminder that this woman who fancied herself better than god was only human after all. “He was a lot younger when I last saw him.”

“So you haven’t seen him in a while?” Joan knew she was repeating the same questions as before Moriarty disappeared for half the night, dropping bombshells about her mother, about her upbringing onto Joan like it was a simple statement of fact.

"No, not recently."

Moriarty set her shoes down and leaned over, taking the phone from Joan's hand before the lock code could engage. She flipped her thumb back over to the email from Sherlock and read it quickly, eyes flicking back and forth as she took in Sherlock's indecipherable shorthand.

"He wants us to look into William’s visit to England?" It was a question that Joan didn't think Moriarty wanted her to answer.

"It would be pretty easy to find out of he'd been to the bank in the past few weeks, wouldn't it?" Joan's suggestion was couched in hesitance, but it did not feel hesitant at all. They were investigating, or so it seemed. Moriarty would disappear for long hours at nice, coming back on the phone and seeming harassed, threats and harsh words on her lips, promises of retribution that Joan pretended she couldn't here. "Or do you think this is about something else?"

Moriarty looked up at Joan with a baleful sort of look, heavy and incredulous. "The girl? Honestly Watson, I'm not going to break if you talk about her."

Joan puffed out her cheeks. "Fine. Yes. The girl that you've hidden away in another city somewhere far away from here and New York. Somewhere Roscoe won't find her."

"William doesn't kill children. Or women."

Joan closed her eyes, hating that there was no reluctance in Moriarty's offering of that detail. She did not want to know why Moriarty knew that, but the sick, anxious feeling that came with needing to know was enough to make her feel insane, torn between two impossibilities. "You're sure?"

“Yes."

"Then why send it at all?"

"Because he went to go see my father." There is no explanation given as to how Sherlock has discovered this detail, or how Moriarty has made this grand assumption; no detail is needed. Moriarty's jaw was set in a resolute line.

Joan took her phone from Moriarty and set it aside. She sat back on her pillows and let her hands trail by her sides. Picking idly at the duvet, she examined Moriarty. Really looked at her when she’d always felt afraid to take her in before.

She took in the dark circles under her eyes barely concealed with a heavy powder that sparkled in the low light of the bedside lamp. She saw that her hair was dirty, pinned back to disguise that it needed washing. She had seen Moriarty sleep a scant handful of hours since they'd arrived in Geneva. Joan was fighting off horrible jetlag, and yet Moriarty showed no signs of needing to sleep.

"You're exhausted." It wasn't a question.

Moriarty looked away, eyes fluttering closed. Her eyeliner was smudged. "I'll be alright."

Her fingers were twisted in the duvet and Joan bit back the urge to say more. Joan watched as Moriarty got wearily to her feet, bending to pick up her shoes. She set them on the low table where their case notes and purses spilled out the tangled web of their intersecting lives. There was a sag in her shoulders as she tugged off her jacket and slung it over the back of a chair, before moving to undo her blouse. She glanced over her shoulder then, one hand still moving expertly down the row of buttons. Her gaze locked with Joan's and an indulgent little grin flittered across her features, making her look young. "Watson," she said, her voice a heady drawl, "You're staring."

Joan looked away, cheeks flushing.

Moriarty continued to undress, speaking now in a friendly, almost flirtatious tone. Joan hated her. "I suppose that would explain a great deal about your romantic woes that Sherlock lamented to me, though, wouldn't it?"

Her face half buried under the blankets and her cheeks burning in shame and the confusing combination of want and revulsion at herself for wanting and for looking, Joan shook her head. "It wouldn't be any more of your business."

"Would it?" Moriarty tilted her head to one side, fingers curling around her bra strap. "I've never minded girls."

So she'd said.

Joan leaned over, fingers fumbling, leaden and blunt, with the light switch. She hit it, and Moriarty's eyes seemed to glow, piercing blue and predatory in the suddenly dark light. "Just... drop it, okay?"

Moriarty said nothing at all. She vanished into the bathroom for a few long moments of Joan trying to still her breathing, caught in a twisted spiral of self-loathing for looking and for wanting. The light clicked off and Joan heard the sound of rustling, steady breathing.

She closed her eyes and wished she was just a little bit weaker.

Maybe it would have been easier then.

  
The morning was hot, sticky and unpleasant. Joan stumbled into the bathroom to find Moriarty brushing her teeth wearing nothing but underwear and a tank top, one strap slipping down over her shoulder. It was an odd image, so utterly human compared to everything that Joan knew Moriarty to be. She stared at her, sleepy and without her glasses for a moment before Moriarty stepped slightly to the left to make room for Joan to wash her hands and put her contacts in.

Joan leaned forward, blinking in the first contact. There were scars on Moriarty’s back, and on her wrists. Joan knew where those came from, the jagged, raised lines from where she had nearly killed herself to save that girl. The ones on her back were older, fainter, silvery and without easy explanation. They transected the freckles on her back. The freckles that mirrored Joan’s own.

Moriarty turned her wrist over, and the mark faced the light, pink and ugly and still fading. Joan closed her other eye hurriedly and waited for her contact to settle. It was better than looking at that scar.

“Did you get any sleep?” she asked after Moriarty dipped her head to spit in the sink.

“Not really.”

Joan sucked in a breath of air, and then tried again. “Do you ever really sleep?”

The weary eyes that met Joan’s sharpened almost instantly, the mask of Moriarty, alert and engaged, fell into place. “When I need to.” She brushed past Joan and out into the room, her fingers lingering for just a second on Joan’s shoulder before vanishing, a breath of cool skin on this sticky, hot morning.

 

“We need to go speak to Mr. Perrin.” Moriarty was standing at Joan’s shoulder. She was wearing a white dress with a black steak across the skirt today. Joan liked it on her, but bit back a compliment after the way that their conversation last night had gone. She didn't want to compliment Moriarty anyway, not right now with doubts and hesitance and worry wrapped around her like a shroud.

They were in line at a little cafe around the corner from their hotel. Moriarty had pointed it out the day before and Joan had been charmed by the spindly little chairs and tables on the sidewalk and the delicious smells of the patisserie inside. She wasn't hungry, but coffee was a necessity for Joan when she was jetlagged and she was still fighting off the effects of her sleep schedule being wildly thrown off by her suddenly relocation to Geneva.

Moriarty ordered an espresso shot in drawling French that marked her as English to the girl behind the counter. Joan ordered in English afterwards and earned herself a sympathetic smile and a whispered confession, as she took her coffee, that her friend's accent was horribly Parisian.

"They know you're not local," Joan said.

The pronouncement earned her a charming smile. "I know, darling, that's the charm of being-" her voice slipped then, low, American, Irene's but different, more polished. She'd been practicing "-good with accents."

"I wish you wouldn't do that."

"Do what?"

"Talk like her."

Moriarty looked away, sipped her espresso and set the tiny cup back down on its saucer. "You said before that there was a lot of truth in Irene. You're right, of course." Her face shifted into a twisted mask of something darker, the blackness that always lurked there, just beyond the pretty veneer of Moriarty. "But I could never be so optimistic."

Joan closed her eyes and exhaled. The coffee was making her sweat. She didn't care.

"Even if you aren't, you shouldn't talk like her."

"Why?" Moriarty turned to face Joan again. "So you're not reminded of what I did to Sherlock? So you don't close your eyes and see him crumpling to his knees, the strongest person you know, reduced to nothing over the sight of a mere woman?" She leaned forward, fingers twisting around Joan's wrist, squeezing tight enough to make Joan want to tug her wrist away and run as fast and as far as her legs could carry her. "I thought you better than that Joan."

"I'm not--" Joan took a sip of coffee to hide her shaking hand. Moriarty's fingers were warm on her skin now, gentle, relaxing. The dichotomy of the two feelings was enough to make her mind spin and want to flee. "I could never forget what you did to him."

Moriarty let go. "Good."

 

Laramie Straus was quiet that morning. Joan was half a step behind Moriarty, and Moriarty's fingers lingered just half a second longer than was strictly necessary on the door, effectively holding it open for Joan. It was a strange feeling, like when Sherlock behaved like such a gentleman in physical manners around her during the first few weeks of their companionship. Joan was not sure how to react, stepping through and nodding her thanks.

Moriarty was all business-like as she stepped forward to speak to Mr. Perrin's secretary, accent from the cafe all but gone from her French as she inquired as to Mr. Perrin's availability.

Inside Joan's purse was the dossier on Roscoe, as well as the photo from the night before. Moriarty had forwarded it to herself before they left and when Joan had gotten out of the shower there was a glossy print out of it sitting on the bed next to her phone. Joan hadn't asked, and Moriarty hadn't offered an explanation.

There were details that were not adding up in this case. Joan was almost certain that Moriarty had orchestrated at least some part of the heist. It had gone all sideways, that much was obvious by how Moriarty was reacting to the developments in the case, but initially it had been her idea. It had to be.

The want to press for more details, to get Moriarty to spit out the truth that she kept so carefully closed off behind that bland smile was enough to make Joan want to scream.

Mr. Perrin came out to greet them and ushered them into his office without so much as a word of hello until the doors were shut tight and locked. Joan raised an eyebrow. Moriarty glanced down and shook her head almost imperceptivity. Not worth it, her body language said.

"Mr. Perrin, we were wondering if you stored your security footage," Joan explained. She sat opposite his desk while Moriarty stood by the window, quietly imposing. "I know that you mentioned that you didn't have any such security in the vault, but in the lobby?"

He nodded just once. "We store for three months on site, I'll get you the hard drives." He got to his feet. "Did you have a suspect?"

Joan nodded. She reached into her purse and produced the photo, knowing that without a decent mug shot the chances of Mr. Perrin recognizing William Roscoe were slim. He took it when she offered it to him, stared at the man for a long time before shaking his head.

"I haven't seen him." Mr. Perrin moved towards the door. "I'll go collect the hard drives. I'm afraid that bank policy will not allow me to let you leave the premises with these documents, as you are not here in an official investigatory capacity. The cantonal police--" he swallowed nervously, "have yet to be informed."

"And why is that, Mr. Perrin?" Moriarty asked, even though they all already knew the answer.

The bank would suffer greatly if any word of this got out. The police, Joan and Agent Matoo had already decided and confirmed with Sherlock through his Interpol contacts, would be notified once the case was air tight and there was no chance that anyone else could be implicated.

"You are not the police." He ducked from the room.

Joan turned to Moriarty, the picture of Roscoe still in her hands. "Can you tell me more about Roscoe?"

Moriarty shook her head, pointing to the camera in the corner with one sly finger. "Not here darling."

 

They were given a conference room and two laptops disconnected from any network. It was boring, dull work, spooling through hours upon hours of footage, looking for a needle in a haystack. By five o'clock the jet lag and exhaustion of their exceptionally boring task overwhelmed Joan. Even Moriarty was yawning, sleepily doodling on the corner of her notepad, a little sketch of a woman Joan recognized herself.

Joan got to her feet, stretching, leaning over to pause the video feed. Her stomach growled. Moriarty eyed her with sleepy, half-closed eyes. "I know a place," she said.

"Thank god."

"If you were hungry, Watson, all you had to do was ask."

Asking was admitting weakness, and not something she wanted to show to Moriarty. Joan resolutely stuck her chin out and shook her head.

"Where are you in the footage?" Joan asked as they gathered their things. Everything would have to stay there, Mr. Perrin had insisted, and they could come back in the morning. This was going to be a thankless task.

"Early May."

Joan froze, remembering what had happened to her during those months. She was getting so good at ignoring the pangs of fear and the nightmares that sometimes cropped up. She did not mourn Mycroft, she'd never loved him, and after all the lies it was impossible to forgive him.

She stared at the lines of Moriarty's back, white cloth with a thick black streak across it. The scars on her back were gone but the freckles remained. Moriarty slipped her notes into her purse and turned to Joan. "I never apologized."

"For what?" Moriarty never apologized for anything.

"I discovered Mycroft Holmes' involvement with the Corsicans far too late in the game to act and spare you that ordeal."

"You were out then?" Agent Matoo had never shared specifics.

Moriarty snapped her purse shut and slung it over her shoulder. She shrugged. Joan supposed it didn't matter much anymore. "I am truly sorry that you got caught up in that conflict, Joan." A genuine expression of regret, at least as far as Joan thought Moriarty was capable of feeling the emotion, twisted at her eyes, softening them in the late afternoon sun.

Joan looked away. "Yeah," she said. "Me too."

 

They walked in silence to the little bistro that Moriarty knew. Joan was used to silence. Sherlock loved to talk, and Joan was fairly certain that Moriarty was in love with the sound of her own voice, but they both seemed to be plagued by the same need for silence that Joan had spent most of her adult life craving.

It wasn't until they were seated that Moriarty confessed loving this place, with its small tables and pristine white tablecloths. "I found it when I was just out of university, caught up in a moment of wanderlust."

"I didn't realize that rich English girls did the backpacking through Europe thing." Joan sipped the water she'd been provided with by a server who came and went so quickly that she’d scarcely noticed him filling their glasses.

"I went to the mountains in Pakistan, actually, took the Khyber railway when they opened it up to tourists again." Moriarty closed her eyes, as if remembering. "To see that mountain, a titan with a shadow that stretched over the horizon." She gave a little shake. "Some myths say the mountains are the sleeping gods of old."

"What do you think?"

"Plate tectonics aren't nearly as interesting, despite being far closer to the truth."

Joan let out a quiet snort of laughter that soon fell silent. The truth… speaking of the truth, she had a question to ask. The server came back with a wine list, and Moriarty ordered after a cursory glance. Joan wanted to say this now, before the wine came and she started to let her guard down.

"Who is Roscoe, really?"

Moriarty folded her hands in front of her primly, looking like the picture of all the innocence she did not possess. She answered as she had before: "Like I said, a contractor I've worked with before."

"And now?"

It took a second before Joan noticed the darkening of Moriarty’s features, how she seemed to grow feral-looking in the split second for the realization of what she planned to do to Roscoe to slam into Joan like a punch to the stomach. She sat back, her expression never changing, and inspected her fingernails. "I think you know."

Joan stared at her.

Moriarty’s eyes flicked from her fingernails to Joan. "Don't look at me that way. Surely you didn't think that I would be willing to let him live for betraying me when all I asked him to do was acquire information, did you Watson?" She shook her head. "And to go to my father of all people..."

Swallowing, Joan leaned forward, knowing that this conversation was in English, but this was a multi-lingual city and someone was bound to understand. "You're going to just kill him for that?" Even saying that hurt.

"I never said that, Watson." Moriarty leaned forward as well, her voice dropping low, conspiratorial. "People have accidents all the time."

Joan bristled, recoiled, and tried to pull herself away from Moriarty’s intense gaze. Moriarty laughed. "You're going to call me a monster, aren't you, Watson? For trying to keep that girl safe?"

"I don't know what you are any more."

 


	13. xii

_“_ _They were right when they said we should never meet our heroes_ _  
When they bow at their feet, in the end it wasn't me”_

"You did this." The words tumbled out of Joan's mouth.  Gone was the ire, the annoyance that Moriarty had been so flippant with the truth.  All that was left now was shock. She'd promised to kill William Roscoe in the same breath as saying it was all for the child.  Joan did not know what to think anymore. "All for Kayden Fuller?"

The restaurant seemed to have fallen silent, a lull in the buzz of conversation.  Joan hated herself for leaning forward, repulsed at her fear of eavesdropping.  Her fingers were shaking in her lap.

Moriarty was going to kill William Roscoe.  She'd said it with laughter and a smile, and then denied that she'd be the one to pull the trigger.  Joan knew better.  She saw Devon Gaspar's body when Moriarty was finished with it.  The hole she'd carved in Gaspar's neck using an army-issued pen knife was enough to give Joan nightmares for weeks. 

All that was for the girl too.

"Really, Joan, what are you going to do about it?  I've admitted to nothing besides ire at his betrayal."  Moriarty sat back, fingers twirling around the stem of her wine glass. 

Sensing that she would get nowhere talking about the girl, Joan tried a different tactic. "Why rob the bank in the first place? That plan must have been months in the making."

"Years," Moriarty assured her.  "I don't suppose it matters much now, the contents of those vaults are in my father's hands."  She let out a quiet breath of air, a sigh on any other person and drained the contents of her wine glass. 

Joan had no idea the truth required such liquid bravado.

"After London I came here."  Moriarty left the implication of why to Joan's imagination.  "I did not want to act on my initial impulse with Sherlock."

"Your initial impulse?"

"He mucked up my plans, some months in the making, and I--" Moriarty's expression twisted from nostalgic to something that Joan could not articulate.  It stayed that way, thoughtful, until the blank mask of Moriarty fell into place.  "I couldn't go back to London, or to New York, and I'd done business here in the past.  I discovered that my father's bank of choice played host to a series of accounts owned by members of the Swiss government."

"Clémence D'Ory."

"What happened to her was such a tragedy."

"You had her killed."

Moriarty laughed.  "You think so little of me, Joan.  Any number of people could have killed her, especially given the secrets that she knew."  She looked down at her wine glass, now empty save a thin ring of reside at the bottom.

Joan raised a skeptical eyebrow.  "What did she know?"

"There was a time, during the Nineties, when people feared the Internet."

Joan glared.  She was a decade or more older than this woman.  She remembered hospitals scrambling to fix their computers after dire warnings of the Y2K bug were announced.  She remembered the dot com boom and more cocaine overdoses than anyone should have to see in one Saturday night.  She remembered how information that was once private, locked in vaults and stored, was not publicly available to fifteen year old kids who knew how to use the phone lines to hack into hospital networks. 

"Clémence knew of this fear, and encouraged Laramie Straus to offer their vaults up as an alternative to the potential discovery of secrets though the movement to digitize all old records here."  Moriarty sounded almost regretful.  Joan reached for her wine.  "She was rather brilliant at seeing a potential problem before it happened."

"She didn't see you."

"Darling, no one sees me."

The save you goes unsaid between them.

"So what, this was all for blackmail?  Don't you have a book of that somewhere?"  Joan sighed.  It didn't matter now.  Moriarty's father worked for Interpol, the secrets were in relatively safe and hopefully law-abiding hands. 

Moriarty laughed bitterly.  My freedom cost me everything I had."

"I doubt that."

"Well, everything they knew about."  Moriarty's expression was predatory.  Their server came back and, without a word, left the bottle of wine on the table.  "I spilled a great many secrets that day, Joan."

"So this was what... to recoup that loss?" 

"Before William came in and mucked it all up, yes.  It was just that. A simple information grab, nothing more, nothing less."  Moriarty blinked innocently at Joan, but Joan knew that at least two bodies were already attached to this crime, and that a third was all but inevitable. 

Joan stood up. "I'm not helping you to rob people."

There was a moment, a table dividing them, where Joan felt for sure that Moriarty was going to let something slip. Her mask would fall away and Joan would left facing the hulking inhuman monster that Jamie Moriarty hid so neatly behind her polished, shiny exterior. 

"I wasn't asking you to help me." Moriarty's tone was mild. "But I think you know what will happen if you do not."

"You'll go back to prison."

"The girl will die."  Moriarty's lips curled, a sneer, threatening and full of malice falling onto her face.  "Sit down, Joan."

Joan sat, hating herself. 

The girl at the center of all this had brown hair and Moriarty's sharp blue eyes. Joan had never seen her in person. Moriarty had whisked mother and daughter away before any more misfortune could befall them. Joan had pressed everyone involved in the investigation after it was technically closed.  She wasn't sure if she was looking for closure, or was simply curious about this, Moriarty's greatest act of narcissism.

Kayden Fuller had done well at school, and was well-liked by her classmates. She played soccer with a brutality that surprised her coaches, and held a school record for penalty minutes at eight years old. There was a concern about an anti-social streak that ran through her, but shyness at that age was to be expected.  It was only if it persisted once the girl grew older that they'd worry there was something wrong.

"Where did you hide them?"

There was a pause, a weighing of the risk, and finally a quiet exhalation from Moriarty. "Lawrence, Kansas."  Moriarty poured herself another glass of wine.

A little snort of laughter escaped Joan's lips. "How very Burroughs of you."  She ran a hand through her hair.  "How viable do you believe this threat is-" She exhaled, and then added, "-Jamie?"

If Moriarty noticed the casual address, her face did not betray it.  Instead she looked away, her expression perfectly neutral. 

Their food was taking a very long time.

Joan did not want to press.  It was foolish to think that she could get Moriarty to speak the truth about something she so clearly did not wish to discuss.  The girl was in grave danger, and Joan did not believe for a second that Moriarty would willingly volunteer the location of the girl.

Something was in Kansas. It wasn’t Kayden Fuller, but Joan was curious what it was.

"The inherent problem is that I do not know the why of it."  Moriarty spoke slowly.  "My father was a broken man last I saw him, plagued by what he'd done to my mother."  She fell silent, fingers twisting around the napkin by her plate.  "This vendetta against a child... it seems out of place."

Joan frowned. "It's been many years since you've seen him. Maybe he's changed?"

Moriarty's expression was grim.  "Or maybe the mask he always wore has fallen away."

Their waiter came back just then, setting beautifully presented food in front of them. 

The conversation died.

 

Later, Joan found herself alone in the hotel room again.  Moriarty dropped her off with a charming smile that felt wine-bold to Joan and had promised to return in short order.  "I have people looking at the rest of Roscoe's crew."

"Do you not know who they are?"  Joan frowned, searching Moriarty's face for any sign of deception. 

"I was out of my head at the time."  Moriarty looked down at her wrist, at the raised angry scar there.  "Blood loss?"

Joan did know.  She knew Moriarty to be surprisingly lethal having lost close to a pint of blood between the time she'd left Agent Matoo half strangled on the floor of her prison and coming to dispatch of Devon Gaspar.  She swallowed; thinking of the gaping hole Moriarty had carved in Gaspar's neck, and looked away. 

"I would have thought that you'd want to pick the crew for something like this."

Moriarty laughed, and had brushed Joan's shoulder with warm, almost familiar fingers before backing away.  She was smiling, the corners of her eyes crinkling with amusement that Sherlock's continued insistence that she study micro-expressions indicated to be genuine amusement.  "You really don't understand how this organization works, do you Joan?" 

She'd left then, sweeping off down the hallway, purse flapping against her side and dress seeming almost yellow in the dim glow of the hallway lights.  Joan stood in the doorway, scowling after her.

 

Joan left the television on a local channel that seemed to be half in English.  She sat, cross-legged, on her bed and spread out her notes from the day. She had wanted to go back through them to see if there was any potential evidence linking William Roscoe to the crime beyond Moriarty's word and the probably red herring of a clue that Sherlock had passed along.  It was maddening, investigating and knowing that there was more to this puzzle than what Moriarty was saying.

This could not all be about Moriarty's soured relationship with her father.  Joan refused to believe that. She was not sure that she could trust Moriarty to tell her the truth about what was really going on here. 

The situation had changed.  Moriarty had laid out her cards, after a fashion, and but Joan felt that she was holding back.  There was a missing piece to the puzzle.  It wasn't Roscoe, or her father, or even Andrew Malphurs at Interpol. 

Joan chewed moodily on the back of her pen, staring down at her notes.  This wasn't the full picture, and she wouldn't be able to protect that little girl without it.

She reached for her phone and dialed Sherlock's number.  She hated running to him for help, but the web was getting twisted.  She needed to ground herself, and to take stock of which way was up.

Sherlock's phone went straight to voicemail.  Joan left him a brief message asking for him to call her back when he was sure that the line would be secure.  "There's something that I'm missing here," Joan finished. She wished he had answered.

The television clicked into the eleven o'clock news broadcast, thankfully in English, and Joan set her phone aside to watch. After the first, human interest story about some local school she knew nothing about, the screen flashed red and the anchor took on a more somber, serious expression.  Joan reached for the remote and unmuted the television.

A body had been found in Lake Geneva, a young woman of Spanish origin.  The Cantonal police had released very little information other than the country of origin, but she had apparently died of a gunshot wound to the forehead at close range.  Her body was then dumped in the lake in a poor attempt to conceal it.

Joan sat back, pulling off her glasses and pressing her thumb and forefinger into her eyes. She was hardened to death now, but she could not think of a worse way to go.  A bullet between the eyes was a mafia style execution.  The sort of killing that would be favored by certain parties who wished to gain control over the city by whatever means necessary. She hated to think of what would happen if they found out that Moriarty was making a bid for the same control through schemes and blackmail.

_She was gone half of last night…_

A cold feeling washed over Joan, realization more chilling than any other revelation. 

 

 


	14. xiii

Roscoe stared out at the lake as the sun dipped below the mountains in the distance and sucked moodily on a cigarette. Smoke curled around his head and made him feel foggy, as if underwater. The heat of the day was still oppressive, and dark clouds hung low in the distance, black with rain and the coming night.

A newspaper sat in his lap, the German headline below the fold proclaiming loudly that a body had been pulled from the lake earlier that morning, and that the dead woman was a Spanish national. Roscoe didn't need the newspaper's speculation to know who was dead. The message was received, loud and clear.

 He'd taken care of Mathieu - he'd gotten too close to the truth. He'd left the records behind to point the figure squarely at his boss, but the ripples from that one act were still repeating, like a stone skipped across a still lake. He was so incredibly stupid. This job was going to get him killed.

Rodriguez was innocent of everything but the heist itself. The heist that had been bought and paid for a thousand times over in trouble so far.

Roscoe lit another cigarette and sighed, smoke billowing from his nostrils. He felt like a brooding dragon, awaiting the white knight come to slay him. The threat was so clearly there, on both ends.

He was trapped between Moriarty and her father. Her terrifying, sociopathic father who wanted nothing more than a little girl strung up in the middle of New York to prove a point to his child. Roscoe had tried to ask why. Devon Gaspar's fate still fresh on his mind. He'd seen the pictures. He knew what his employer was capable of doing when properly motivated.

He sucked death into his lungs, his days were numbered. He'd run back to Geneva. Back into the arms of those he had betrayed.

"Is a warning going to be enough?" he mused to the growing storm.

 

It was raining sheets of Alpine rain turned icy over the lake and plunging the temperature from a pleasant twenty to a sour fourteen. Roscoe's jacket creaked, leather stiffening as it dried. The storm had come not long after sunset. Lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating the rain-drenched city around it in flashes of brilliance that left Roscoe's eyes aching.

His phone was ringing. _Blocked caller._

He wiped the phone screed with the base of his ratty t-shirt and held the phone to his ear, praying it was the younger Moriarty. At least with her he had something to bargain with.

"Roscoe."

"Rodriguez is dead."

Roscoe ran a tired hand over his face. "Then you know." His fate was sealed.

Her voice sent a shiver down Roscoe's spine that had little to do with the rapidly decreasing temperature. "I've known for some time, William. I was curious as to your motives, so I let you keep at your little charade."

"Then you know what he has planned for that girl." Roscoe caught himself wondering, just for a moment, if she even cared about the child, or if it was the act of being double-crossed that was really what was buzzing in her bonnet. She'd never shown compassion for children in all the time he had worked for her. She'd had Moran do a few of them to prove a point to an Iranian diplomat that was attempting to slight her back in London before she'd disappeared for six months and come back more ruthless than ever, eyes fixed firmly on New York.

This was her blood though, at least according to everything he'd gathered on the girl. The last of the Moriartys.

Only not any more. Moriarty the father had forgotten his first wife and the child he'd had. The official records declared that girl dead not long after the wife, suicides both.

Roscoe wasn't so sure.

"He will not be finding her."

"I wouldn't be so sure he hasn't already." Roscoe had the address when he'd left London. A college town in Middle America.  He knew where the girl was.  He knew what he would have to do in order to satisfy one employer and sign his death warrant with the other.  There was a red notice in his name, someone at Interpol was poking around where their nose did not belong.  

She was silent, weighing words, baiting Roscoe to press on.  Roscoe wanted to press on.  He wanted to make it clear that he wanted no part of a child killing. That was not who he was and she herself had tried to cure him of his morals on more than one occasion to little success.  

“You won’t do it.”

“No.”  Roscoe exhales.

“Does he realize you won’t?”

Roscoe bit his lip, rubbing at his three day old beard and thinking.  The elder was not the sort who would understand such a thing.  The younger was far too ruthless to let this just slip away.  He was a dead man walking.  “Probably not.”

“Good.”

He heard the word in the air around him, and then the soft click of a flip burner phone snapping closed.  She was standing right before him, dressed in a pretty white dress with a black slash across her chest.  Despite her umbrella, the shoulders of her trench were wet.

“Then you won’t be missed.”

Time seemed to slow.  He saw the gun, it hovered plainly in his vision. He opened his mouth and her sneering lips pulled upwards, a picture of pleasurable amusement.  He was going to die, Roscoe knew it now.  He’d gambled and he’d gambled incorrectly. He’d always had a problem.  “M—“ he started.

She shot him three times.  Twice in the chest and once between the eyes.

William Roscoe’s body slumped down against the support column of the bridge lifeless, the blood pooling and mixing with the rain that fell in sheets around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> an: hey everyone - just thought that I'd drop everyone a line to thank you all for your wonderful support and kind words of encouragement as I spin this web of lies between Joan and Moriarty. I'm about to get very, very busy, so please don't think I've abandoned this story if it goes a while between updates. I'm going to focus any non-carmilla related writing that I do over the next few weeks on attempting to finish a heist story and continuing work on my hilarious nanowrimo project of lol-I-didn't-even-get-to-10k before I gave up. Mostly I want to finish a heist story.


	15. xiv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: discussion of rape in this chapter.

_“I want to hold you close_   
_Soft breath, beating heart_   
_As I whisper in your ear_   
_I want to fucking tear you apart”_

Moriarty came back wet from the rain. Damp, water dripping from her jacket, she appeared to have wilted.  She shrugged off her trench and leaned her umbrella against the wall by the door. She tugged off wet shoes and moved to set them on the windowsill. She draped her coat over the back of the chair at the desk on her way. Her movements were silent, tight and controlled.

Joan watched her with narrowed eyes from where she lay, not yet asleep, on her bed.

Standing by the window, shoes still dangling from her curled fingers, Moriarty paused. "You're awake."

“Couldn't sleep." Joan didn't want to tell her why. Not until she was sure.

Moriarty arranged her shoes so they would dry in the morning sun and turned, silhouetted in the dim streetlight from outside their hotel. Her back was rigid, a straight line of tension. "Roscoe is dead."

Joan sat up.

"As are Mathieu and Rodriguez. Roscoe did Mathieu, he was the lock expert. Before Sherlock so helpfully passed on Roscoe's name, I assumed that Rodriguez was the leak. She was obviously the weakest of the crew, the newest to the field." Moriarty sighed and stepped over to flip on a light. "I found this in her things."

From her purse, set on the end of her bed, Moriarty produced a slim file and passed it to Joan. Inside were two pieces of paper and a single photograph. Joan leaned over and pulled her glasses from their case and put them on. She read in stony silence, the paper in her hand was a contract for a murder. The other document was obviously what the original had been, a coded message sent via an email. And a photograph of Joan, running through the streets of home.  

She set the file down and shakily pulled off her glasses. Moriarty was staring at her with such intensity that Joan felt exposed, scrutinized. She shifted nervously, feeling underdressed in sleep shorts and a tank top. "She was hired to kill me?"

"Or watch you, the contract is non-specific and she wasn't exactly forthcoming with that information when I asked." Moriarty closed up her purse after pulling out her phone and a flip burner that Joan had never seen before. "I'm surprised you haven't deigned to speak judgment upon me."

"She was going to kill me?"  Joan’s mind felt sluggish, numb from the pronouncement.  She couldn’t process what Moriarty was saying to her.  She couldn’t think beyond that pronouncement of fact.

Moriarty softened then, hair frizzing in the dim light of the hotel room. She gathered it, lips pursed, and pulled a band from her wrist and tied it up into a messy bun, frowning as Joan stared openly at her. "I cannot say for certain. The contract was not with me. If it had been, then yes: I would say she was hired to kill you." She looked down at her purse and added. "You're not stupid, darling, you know what would have happened had I let this play out."

"And Roscoe?"

"The same."

Only the circumstances and stakes were different.

"He betrayed you."

"I'm not above revenge, Joan, but this wasn't about that. Roscoe came crawling back to me because he did not want to kill the girl, as he was instructed to do by my father. I have no time for cowardly men who cannot simply refuse a job."

Joan sighed and closed the folder. This was like the plot of some gangster movie. He couldn’t have turned it down. "To refuse would have been his death." She sat back on the pillows, pulling one up and propping herself up against it. She wasn't tired. She wasn't even horrified at Moriarty's actions; they were cold, murderous, but grimly logical.

"True." Moriarty moved to unzip her dress, seemingly unashamed that Joan was staring at her. She tugged the zip, twisting her hand behind her back to pull it down more fully. She regarded Joan for a moment, hands still on the zipper behind her back, lost in thought. "I'm surprised by your lack of reaction."

"As am I." Joan ran a hand through her hair, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. She didn't know why she wasn't having the visceral, gut-punch reaction that she'd expected to have.  She’d known it was coming, ever since she’d stood on that beach on Long Island and listened to Moriarty explain the particulars of how traveling with her was going to go.  Moriarty was going to kill someone, somewhere along the way, and Joan had to live with how that made her feel if she wanted to get to the bottom of this.

The entire plan was so flawlessly orchestrated by Moriarty in the first place, save for whatever it was that William Roscoe had done to get himself mixed up in the affairs of Moriarty the father.  She was caught up in a war that she didn’t really understand, father and daughter going head to head over something that was far deeper than a simple power struggle.

“What is your father’s name?” Joan asked quietly.

“Come again?”

“What’s your father’s name?” She asked again, not feeling impatient, just legitimately curious. 

Moriarty shrugged off her dress.  Joan looked away, color in her cheeks rising as Moriarty stood in a slip and bra, bending to pick it up. There was a small smile playing on her lips, smug and self-indulgent. She knew Joan looked, and she wanted Joan to look.  They were venturing into dangerous territory.

“His name is Charles.  But if you’re going to look him up, I’d suggest a different name: Edwin Van DeVeer.” Moriarty’s lips twisted into a grimace, curling into a look of utter hatred.  In the half-light of the hotel room she looked washed out, yellow and stark black shadows, her face a mask of anger. 

Joan swallowed and rolled over, reaching for her phone where it sat on the far side of the bed, charging on an available outlet.  Moriarty watched her for a moment from the bathroom door before disappearing inside.  She left the door cracked, and the fan clicked on.  The shower followed.  Joan typed the name into Google.

 

Eddie Van DeVeer ran a cocaine smuggling ring across most of southern England during the 1970s and early eighties. He'd worked under some of the best gangsters of the time, negotiating other drug deals with the French Connection, and had ties to the IRA. While British authorities could never actively link him to a bombing, it was long-suspected that he was bankrolling the domestic terrorism that plagued much of that decade.

He was a nasty piece of work, regardless of his slippery nature. Implicated in the deaths of close to thirty members of rival gangs in the first six months of 1980 alone. After that, he'd gone quiet for a spell. Joan's mind supplied easily that he'd had a child during that time, but soon the unexplained deaths started back up again.

Joan read greedily, thumb swiping anxiously through two decades of police work. Van DeVeer had never been caught, had never so much as breathed a word to anyone after 1985. He was a legend, a ghost in the great machine of the British criminal underworld. No one knew what had happened to him, he'd never been caught on film, and no one knew what he looked like.  He sounded like one of Sherlock’s white whales.

She opened a new tab, searching again, this time for Charles Moriarty. She found the man quickly, taking in the same high cheekbones, stark white-blonde hair and the smatterings of a beard in many of his photos. She let out a quiet snort of laughter. The man had a Wikipedia page.

Ignoring Sherlock's voice in her head telling her that such a page was not an accurate or adequate place to locate information, Joan clicked the link and read about the businessman turned Interpol savant in the mid-80s, and his rise to prominence following the death of his wife – the heir of the Banks family textile fortune - and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Charles Moriarty had done well for himself, taking over businesses run by his wife's family and guiding them through the jump into the technological age. He'd been ahead of his time in many fields, and by the time his young, beautiful wife had committed suicide at the tender age of thirty after suffering from a depressive episode for several years, he transferred power over to his board of directors and left the family business to go work for Interpol...

 

The whole thing read like some sort of tragic soap opera. The man had remarried, had a new family, a new wife and children.

The shower stopped, half a second later the fan clicked off.

"He disappeared because he went legit?" Joan called out.

The rustling of towels stopped and Moriarty appeared in the doorway, wet hair still sticking to her forehead, wrapped in a silk robe that clung to her body where she hadn't fully dried off. "He never needed to transition his business away from illegitimate enterprise." Moriarty shook her head. "It was never about the money…"

"Then why?"

Moriarty produced a towel from behind the door and began to rub at the ends of her hair. "My mother's family started to ask questions, ones that he wasn't prepared to fabricate the truth to answer."

"So he just, what? Got himself a job at Interpol?" Joan scowled down at her phone's screen as it winked out and jabbed the button to bring it back to life. "That's a bit of a one-eighty."

"Saved him having to answer to the red notice in his name."

"Suppose so."

“It’s still on the books you know.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

They fell silent again. Moriarty disappeared back into the bathroom. The hair dryer clicked on. Joan copied the link from the article she'd been reading and sent it to Sherlock through one of his burner phones. The hair dryer clicked off. Moriarty's robe was still damp, still clinging to her skin.

She sat down next to Joan's phone. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, a little blotchy and older-looking in the lamplight. "My mother's family is old, landed. That sort of aristocracy." She paused, and then gave an emotionless little laugh. "Or they were, they're all dead now."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be, darling." Moriarty shook her head. "It's for the best, family can only hold you back."

Joan blinked sleepily, she was tired enough that she didn't care about the mind games they were playing. "Does Kayden Fuller hold you back?"

Moriarty's face betrayed no emotion at all. "No." At the slight furrowing of Joan's brow and the small frown she couldn’t quite manage to hide, Moriarty added. "I never wanted her to have that role in my life, Joan. How Devon Gaspar discovered her existence is anyone's guess, but I'd wager that his source was my father."

"And how did _he_ know?"

"I've no idea. I removed myself from his life long before I fell pregnant."

Joan set her phone down on the bed beside her.  “You say it like it’s a disease.”

“Perhaps that is how I felt at the time.” Moriarty bit her lip and looked down at her hands.  Her nail polish was chipped.  “I was very young.  It was the end of my world.”

Joan leaned past her, reaching for her purse.  “I can imagine, you were what? Twenty-three?”

“Twenty-two. She was born two months after my twenty-third birthday.”  Moriarty watched as Joan rummaged in her purse.  Moriarty had borrowed the nail polish a few days ago, back when they’d first arrived.  Joan had let her, not seeing the harm in it.   She held it out now, again, like a peace offering.

Moriarty’s fingers closed around the little bottle and her eyes soften, almost smile.  “Thank you.”

“I don’t want to know how you did it.”  Joan said, her voice barely above a whisper.  “I won’t condone it.”

Moriarty’s fingers were warm, and she let them linger around Joan’s for a long time, her eyes soft and almost friendly.  “I shan’t tell you.”

Joan didn’t say thank you. She reached for the remote and put on the television while Moriarty carefully fixed her chipped nails.

 

They ended up getting sucked into an old French film playing on the local news station after hours.  It was in black and white, and there were no English subtitles, so Moriarty leaned against Joan and translated, her nails splayed out so that they would dry.  It felt oddly intimate, and when Joan started to feel sleep pull at the frayed edges of wakefulness, she made no move to kick Moriarty out and to her own bed.  She simply slid down the bed and pulled the blankets over both of them, dozing on Moriarty’s shoulder as the movie and its torrid and complicated love affair lulled her into sleep.

She woke up to sun streaming in through the window, Moriarty curled around her.  It was only eight o’clock.  She’d barely managed five hours of sleep. 

Her mind was racing, caught up in the dreams of her scant hours asleep and the feeling of sleeping with someone next to her.  Mycroft had been the last person she’d shared a bed with, and he slept splayed out, taking up as much space as a single person could.  Moriarty was different, curling into a small ball, as if to protect herself and Joan too, one arm slung protectively across Joan’s stomach. 

Her phone buzzed.  Sherlock had received her text and was intrigued, promising to look into more details and get back to her.  Joan adjusted herself and went back to reading about Moriarty’s family, her father and step mother, her two sisters and brother, all under the age of fifteen.  How strange must it be, to know of her existence?

_Did they even know?_

She read more in the morning, Moriarty dozing on her shoulder.  Sunlight streamed through the half open blinds as Joan put on her glasses and continued to scan her reading.  It was strange, to have this connection, this time between them that was without any real pressure to put on airs.

“You’re up early.”  Moriarty had turned into Joan’s neck and wasn’t moving.  Her breath was warm and gentle on Joan’s neck.

“Sherlock emailed.”

“Does he know about Roscoe?”

“I hadn’t told him yet. Do you want me to?”

Moriarty stiffened, she pulled her arm back from Joan and turned over, sitting up and rubbing at her face, still pink and bearing the impression of Joan’s tank top strap.  “He’ll figure it out soon enough.”

“I’m not covering for you.”

“No one’s asked you to, Joan.”  Moriarty pulled her hair away from her forehead and glanced at Joan’s phone.  She frowned. “Why are you still looking at those pictures?”

Joan looked down at her phone, at the snapshot uploaded to Wikipedia of Charles Moriarty and three smiling children on some mountain somewhere. "I just thought it was strange, you know, to think about. You have a brother and two sisters."

"I do." Moriarty let out a quiet humming noise. The sunlight had caught her hair, it shone golden, beautiful. She looked up, hand letting her hair fall back into place, casting her eyes into shadow.  Her eyes found Joan’s and held them, intense points of icy blue. "If anything happens to the girl, my father knows the fate in store for them."

Bile rose into the back of Joan's throat, festering, gagging her. She didn't break Moriarty's gaze.

"You think I'm a monster, don't you? An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind and all that tripe."

It was too early for this, but Joan couldn’t help herself. "I think that William Roscoe had some honor, refusing to kill children," Joan spat. "And you're threatening your own flesh and blood over this petty feud you have with your father!"

Moriarty's hand shot out, closing firmly around Joan's neck. She pushed, her hands surprisingly forceful until Joan fell back onto the pillows of her bed. Her larynx burned and she struggled to breathe, but Moriarty's grip was like iron. Joan's fingernails clawed at Moriarty's wrist, but she was unmoved, even as blood appeared from where Joan's nails dug into her wrist.

She loomed over Joan, eyes burning blackness into Joan's very soul. "I tolerate your judgment. I listen to your admonishment because you are in this thing as much as I am right now. But I will not, I refuse, to hear you call that man and his offspring my flesh and blood." She leaned down, her breath ghosting on Joan's lips. "Do I make myself clear, Watson?"

Her vision was starting to blur. Joan forced her chin to move up and then down. She was going to pass out. Moriarty's breath was hot against her cheek.

"Good." The grip loosened and Joan gasped for air. Moriarty did not pull away, watching intently as Joan caught her breath and rubbed at her surely bruised neck. "He raped my mother you know."

"I know."

"She was in a manic state when they got married, and he locked her in a room - tied her to the bed - until the deed was done. I came along nine months later." Moriarty shifted, her weight settling back against Joan. "He wanted an heir to my mother's family fortune, and her family knew that she wasn't mentally competent to consent to a marriage. He persuaded them to let him have her, and they agreed. They gave her to him to make an heir, and then he killed them all."

Joan swallowed. She didn't want to be so close to Moriarty, but moving away didn't appeal to her either. She was shocked that Moriarty would react so violently, and she hated that she didn't want to run. "What are you going to do to him?"

"I'm going to destroy him."

"I figured as much. Are you going to try and kill me again?"

Shifting, Moriarty leveled gaze at Joan that could only be interpreted as regretful. "Are you going to run away from me if I say yes?"

She couldn't. Not yet. Not until she knew that girl was safe. Not until she got to the bottom of this strange relationship between father and daughter. "No." Joan sighed, arm falling over her eyes. "I just... don't fly off the handle when I say things you don't like. We're going to piss each other off, we're diametrically opposed on so many levels. Just... Christ Jamie. You-- could have killed me. You're like an addict just come sober. Unpredictable."

She chuckles. "I'd hate to be predictable."

"You could have killed me." Joan repeats.

"I could have kissed you too, Joan."

"I'm glad you didn't."

"Why?"

"You haven't earned that right yet."

 

It was cooler outside, the rain had blown in patchy clouds that drifted with heavy black bottoms over the city. The cool was welcome, an excuse to wear one of the sweaters that she'd brought with her thinking that she was due for an Alpine winter, not summer. She dressed while Moriarty was in the bathroom, doing "something with my hair" as she'd put it.

Their encounter still reverberated within every nerve in her body. The choking desperation of her goading Moriarty into action, finally into action, after so much grandstanding. Joan felt vindicated, she'd gotten to the very bottom of the truth, but heartbroken for what it must have been like, to be that man's daughter. To carry the scars of her conception long into adulthood. It wasn't right, and the bruises that Joan had smeared concealer over before wrapping a light summer scarf around her neck only served as a reminder.

The why of this whole thing was assaulting her, brutalizing her every breath. Why was she letting Moriarty behave this way? Why wasn't she reacting as she thought she might? Why was the lull, the pull of this under worldly adventure she was so swept up in enough to make her start to forget her morals? The bank heist was solved, Joan was sure they'd probably have to go back to Laramie Straus only a few more times. What was more important now was the girl and the threats made against her.

She had a text from Sherlock: a promise to make discrete inquires regarding Eddie Van DeVeer. She texted him back, lamenting that she had very little else to go on. She didn't want Sherlock to know the specter of Moriarty's childhood just yet. She didn't want to draw him in.

"I'm sorry." Moriarty came back into view, hair perfectly pinned up into an elaborate bun that looked like it was held in place by a mountain hairspray and the force of Moriarty's very considerable willpower. She was fastening an earring, standing barefoot in dark jeans and soft sweater that had Joan slightly jealous. "For before."

"You don't mean it," Joan answered glumly. She set her phone aside.

"I do." Moriarty sighed and let her hands fall to her sides. "I'm no good at saying it, Joan."

"Then show me."

She held out her hand, a devil's smile playing at her lips. "Get breakfast with me, I'll explain."

 

Breakfast was a silent affair, coffee taken inside the little cafe they'd taken to frequenting as the outside tables were wet from the night's rain. Moriarty bought a copy of the Times, and Joan embraced the moment of reading the news from home. She'd been away nearly two weeks now, and already the news seemed alien. She read the baseball boxes with furrowed eyebrows. The Mets were on an eight game slide now, terrible. Her rent and power bill were both set to come due next Thursday, she had to remember to pay them.

Moriarty had vanished with her coffee cup behind the Arts section as soon as they'd sat down, so when someone cleared their throat beyond their newsprint shields, she flipped the corner of the page down and absolutely glowered at the intruder.

Andrew Malphrus’s suit was charcoal black today, his tie a slash of red against his checked blue and white shirt. He looked fashionable, a youthful businessman.

"What can I do for you Andrew?"

He shifted from foot to foot, looking uncomfortable under Moriarty's intense gaze. Joan tried to smile at him, but found that her lips wouldn't quite bend the in the right way.

"William Roscoe is dead. I need both of you to come with me."

"You have no authority here, Andrew."

"Don't make me call the cantonal police and make this official, M."

She folded up her newspaper and glanced at Joan. "So this is an unofficial inquiry? Then kindly piss off."

"I'm afraid it isn't that simple, M. This directive doesn’t come from me."

Moriarty's gaze hardened. "Oh, and what does he want?"

"For you to come, quietly and without a fuss, and for Doctor Watson to accompany you."


	16. xv

_Running in circles, keeping all secrets_

_Hiding the beauty of all our feelings_

_You’ve hurt me once, but no more…_

They were separated as soon as they arrived at the cantonal police’s offices.  They were led into a fairly non-descript building that was a far-cry from the austere and beautiful buildings that dotted the city and took Joan’s breath away.  Joan was taken into a conference room and asked to wait in thickly accented English by a uniformed officer with a lapel tag that read Gratz.  She smiled at him; worry settling into the pit of her stomach and set at the end of the table furthest from the door.

Malphrus wanted them separately, or rather his employer did.  Joan was starting to think that the story of Moriarty's father was just the tip of whatever iceberg she'd inadvertently stumbled upon when she'd allowed Agent Matoo to talk her into looking into this.  The way that Moriarty had responded quietly and without so much as batting an eyelash to Malphrus's request filled Joan with disquiet.  Who was the 'he' in this conversation?

Could Moriarty's father be pulling the strings all the way from England?  Or at least, that was Joan thought he was based.  Moriarty had never said.

From her purse, Joan unearthed a notebook and pen.  She clicked the back of it a few times, noting that it was chewed and probably had belonged to Sherlock at one point in time. So many of her things were touched by Sherlock these days.  She'd spent last night in bed with his ex, she was still smarting from coming home to find him gone one day.  They'd lashed out at each other after what Mycroft did, and now Joan was so deep into this thing with Moriarty that all she wanted was for Sherlock take a train down here and make it all better.  Just his presence in the room would be enough.

Joan started to write.  Everything that she could remember about the case thus far.  She carefully avoided the trail of bodies that had appeared over the past few days, her stomach churning at the thought of covering up for Moriarty's killings.  Kayden Fuller was at the center of this, and Joan had to know more about why.  What was so important about the biological child of a woman who'd been thought dead by her father for over a decade until an unfortunate encounter had brought her back to life?

There were been no requests for her to stay off her phone.  There was no indication that they were in any sort of trouble, save that fact that Moriarty had shot William Roscoe last night.  Her fingers itched for her phone, to call Sherlock and tell him what was happening, to ask him what he remembered about the Fuller case.  She wanted to know what he thought of this whole convoluted mess of a case.

_What was the point in calling him?_   Joan sighed and pushed her purse away.  There was no reason to call Sherlock when he would tell her to run away from Moriarty before things got any worse, to forget the case before it got her killed.

She let out a quiet sigh, hand reaching up to shakily touch her neck and wince away at the purpling bruises there.  Moriarty would kill her without a second thought, the moment she was no longer useful.

The reality of it was chilling.

There was a knock on the door, and Andrew Malphrus's irritatingly well-kept head appeared. His hair was slicked back and not a line was out of place on his wrinkle-free suit.  "Ms. Watson, I'm so sorry to keep you waiting." 

Joan regarded him coolly, but said nothing.  She would not budge an inch until she knew more about who he worked for.  Her eyes tracked Malphrus as he moved into the room, slinking like a serpent, ready to strike.  He looks just like her, Joan thought darkly, waiting for his opportunity to catch her in a lie.  "As I'm sure you know, William Roscoe, your man for the Laramie Straus heist, is dead."

"Do you know anything about the information he stole?" Joan kept her tone mild, pulling her notebook towards herself and holding it poised to take notes.  "Has it been recovered?"

Malphrus's lips dipped slightly and his brow furrowed.  Joan felt a little thrill of victory shoot up her spine. He hadn't been expecting her to engage or attempt to participate in the conversation as an investigator would. That was good, it meant that she was still without reproach in his eyes. She could use that. "We were hoping that you could help with that."  His gaze was pointed as he sat down.  "We know she did it."

The decision came in a split second then, and Joan forced herself to smile blithely at Malphrus.  "Do you?" she asked, her tone perfectly even. Indecision bit at her, and Joan chewed the inside of her lip for a long moment before exhaling and sitting back, trying to show nonchalance the way that Sherlock or Moriarty would so breezily present it. "If I know anything about her I know that she will not be caught so easily."  She pursed her lips, tilting her head to one side.  "No offense, but catching her the first time was a challenge, and the second time only happened because she was nearly dead of blood loss."

He tapped the file he had brought in with him and flipped it open.  Inside, Joan guessed correctly, were pictures of William Roscoe, dead of a gunshot wound between the eyes.  There was no stippling around the wound, and, if her ability to read French upside-down was to be believed, no bullet or gun was recovered.  "William Roscoe was shot last night, Doctor Watson, do you know where she was?"

Hating herself, Joan nodded.  This was bigger than Andrew Malphrus, he didn't know nearly as much as he thought he did.  "She was with me. We were at Laramie Straus until late - eight maybe.  You can check with them. We had a dinner at a restaurant she knew, then we went back to the hotel around eleven or so.  There was a movie on television.  Jamie painted her nails.  We slept--" Joan trailed off, rattled at how it sounded.  Domestic, platonic, even loving.  Nothing like the woman who'd hand her hands around Joan's neck and lips so close Joan still wasn’t sure if she wanted to taste them or claw them off her face.  The jury was still out on that one.

"And I'm to take the bruises on your neck as what then?"

Her body betrayed her, and Joan was grateful for it.  Her cheeks were rosy and flushed at the embarrassment she felt over his noticing them.  She looked down at her hands.  _Let him buy this_ , she thought darkly.  _Please let him buy this_. "There... is a lot of intensity." She faltered, looked up to see the tips of Malphrus's ears turn scarlet at his own realization - his own imaginings of the encounter.  "I like it," she finished in a mumble.

Let him think what he wanted, it would make this easier, make this over. It would force Moriarty's hand.

"I've got a receipt," Joan added as an afterthought.  She reached for her purse and produced the credit card receipt for dinner.  It was in Jamie's name, her real name.  It would prove she wasn't hiding for anything, let alone a murder she certainly did commit.  She held it out to Malphrus, a carefully neutral expression on her face.

Malphrus's expression was unreadable, but he closed Roscoe's file and got to his feet.  "Thank you, Doctor Watson, you've been most illuminating."

 

"You gave me an alibi." Moriarty was incredulous.  "Why?"

They were back in the hotel room, the windows flung open to let in the bright sunshine of the day. Joan sat on the edge of the still-made up bed, eyes trained on the window.  She didn't want to explain it - the words felt like traitors no matter how she jumbled them up.

The silence stretched out between them, and the sounds from the street beyond the open window. Birds singing in the trees threatened to overpower the silence and drown them both out in a cacophony of background noise.  Joan stared hard out the window, willing herself not to turn around as the bed dipped beside her, as a firm hand reached for her shoulder and tried to turn her around.  She shrugged it off, lips tilting downwards into a frown and then a scowl when the tugging grew more insistent.

"I don't know why I did it, okay?"  She snapped it out before she could take it back and hide it away.

Moriarty's smile was small, not quite the genuine one that Joan had taught herself to look for during this trip.  "You're in this now, aren't you Joan?"

She sighed. "I think I always was."

She looked away, out the window.  Moriarty's hand was warm on Joan's shoulder.  "I never envisioned having a companion through this."

Joan gave a harsh laugh. "I never envisioned being an accessory after the fact."

"It was him or the girl. The message had to be sent."  Moriarty's lips were at her ear and Joan wanted to turn into her, to see what would happen.  She stayed still, felt the warmth of Moriarty on her shoulder and pressed against her thigh.  "I think the world is better off without a hardened criminal as opposed to the loss of an innocent."

"She has a name," Joan sucked in a steadying breath, the burning memory of Moriarty's fingers closed around her neck made her blood sing with fear and self-loathing want at the proximity.  "It'll make this seem less like a game if you call her by it."  She turned then, one eyebrow raised, and was nose to nose with Moriarty's icy stare.

Moriarty shook her head and pulled her hand away from Joan's shoulder.  "It's a horrible name."  She let out a quiet breath of air.  "Had I felt... better suited to motherhood I might have named her Ruth.  For my mother."

Joan said nothing. Moriarty's mother's name was not Ruth, but Kayden Fuller was a sore spot for Moriarty, and she liked to think she knew why. The complicated myriad of emotions that Moriarty kept buried surrounding the girl, however, only confused Joan. She had no understanding of it at all. "Jamie," she started.  She felt Moriarty tense beside her.  They still weren't used to that name passing between them, it seemed.  She couldn't keep talking, she couldn't force herself to choke out the words of this maddeningly complex situation. "Is she safe?  Truly?"

"Yes." Moriarty gave a curt nod.  "I shan't tell you where she is."

"Probably for the best."  Joan faltered.  "Not in Kansas then?"

"No, Kansas is something else.  Perhaps I should show you, now that Laramie Straus is all wrapped up."

"And Malphrus?"

"I suspect he'll follow where ever we go."  Moriarty's breath felt warm on Joan's cheek.  It was a hot day, she wanted to go down to the lake.  A breeze filtered in through the windows, kissing Joan's skin where Moriarty would not - could not - she couldn't allow it yet.  "You did the right thing, telling Malphrus I was with you."

She got to her feet.  "I hope I did."

Anything to settle the anxious feeling in her stomach.

With the distance between them came some clarity.  Joan leaned against the desk, her fingers curling around the edge.  "When Malphrus came to get us, he implied that it was on someone's orders.  Do you know whose?"

Moriarty sighed and pulled her purse towards her.  Inside there was a folder much like the one that Malphrus had brought with him when he'd come to speak to Joan.  "This is the case file on Roscoe's death," she explained with a single arched eyebrow that dared Joan to ask how she'd managed to get her hands on it.  "The request came as Andrew's strings are pulled, by my father through his veneer of legitimacy. He must have sensed the same weakness in Roscoe I did years ago, the unwillingness to kill children, and judged that Roscoe would come slinking back to me to get out of it."

"Blood for blood?"

"Roscoe outlived his usefulness and he threated what is mine."  Moriarty shrugged and looked down at her handiwork, her fingers splayed out around the attractive older man, his skin ashen with the pallor of death.

"She isn't yours."  Joan turned and reached for her notes.  "You gave her away."

"Blood is blood, Joan.  It is one of the few things my father and I see eye to eye on."

"Are you going to kill him?"

"You keep asking me that, my answer is the same."  Moriarty's lip curled and she held out the folder to Joan.  "Sherlock is due to call you.  Listen to what he has to say."

Joan took the file and tucked it into her purse.  "And then?"  Was Moriarty talking to Sherlock too, stringing him along as she was Joan?  Joan hoped that wasn't the case.  Sherlock deserved to be free of the mess Moriarty left in her wake, she was a fool for dragging him back into this proxy war.

"Come and ask me again."

"Will I get the same answer?"  Moriarty's smile was mysterious.  She rose to her feet and pressed the gentlest of kisses against Joan's cheek.  "That's part of the game, Joan: the guessing and the false starts."

 

 In a way, it was a blessing when Joan's phone rang and she took her purse and room key and left Moriarty to her stewing over her father and Andrew Malphrus.  Joan can leave her hammering heart and the burning memory of lips on her cheek and wander down to the water, talking to Sherlock, reveling in the sound of his voice.

"Andrew Malphrus is working under orders," Joan explained. She hurried down the stairs and out into the bright Swiss morning.  She’d pulled her headphones from her pocket.  "Hang on, I’m going to switch to the mic.” She pugged it up and set the earpiece in her ear and tucked her phone into her pocket. “He's here, investigating the death of William Roscoe."

"Did she do that?"  Sherlock seemed unimpressed by Moriarty having a father.  "Roscoe, I mean?"

Joan sighed.  She did not want to explain it to him.  “I don’t know.  She was with me last night.”

“Don’t lie for her Watson, don’t let her draw her into your game.”  His tone was reproachful and Joan could see him curled around his phone, a scowl on his face.  “I know she shot him and I … well, she’s acting as one might predict, given what’s been threatened and her prior track record with it.”

“She is very possessive of what she deems to belong to her,” Joan agrees.

“Would that include you?”

“Sherlock!”  She doesn’t know why she’s scandalized.

“You’re living like a kept woman, Watson, one might make assumptions.”

“Well one would be wrong. And she still sees you like that too.”  Joan resists the urge to add a ‘so there’ at the end of her statement, but she is troubled by what he’s said.  She knows as well as he does that there is an element of truth that’s budding, gently blossoming and trying with all its might to break free from the surface.  Joan has wanted her since that first moment of truth, her clothes slipping from her body in the semi-darkness, Joan’s brain still half addled with sleep. 

“She’s a foul temptress, you should—“

“I know, I know, it’s all a game.”  Joan runs a hand through her hair and yanks the headphone out of her ear.  She jams it in again and hears only Sherlock’s breathing.  She’s turned towards the lake now, and is walking aimlessly, exposed.  Would Moriarty’s father attempt revenge?  Or was he glad to be rid of Roscoe too?  “All the information that you’ve been getting, Sherlock, where does it come from?”

He hummed, “Higher ups.  They’re interested in the Laramie Straus case.”

“They’re not.”  Joan sighed.  “There’s someone pulling the strings.”

"Yes, your Mr. Van DeVeer.  Very nasty, how on earth did you dig up his existence?" There was the sound of papers shifting. "Last night you sent me a link to a Wikipedia article of all things.  When I read it..."

"I take it your reaction was the same as mine?"

"I had no idea she still had a living parent."  Sherlock paused.  "Are you certain that she isn't mistaken?"

"I'm positive. It's her father, Sherlock. She's got a better picture of the lies he told during her childhood than most anyone." 

Joan came to a stop at an intersection, her wandering had caught her blind, and she had no idea where exactly she was.  She paused and eyed an empty bench for a moment before sitting down on it hard and resting her elbows on her knees.  "It's horrible."

"It is, but it does not excuse murdering people and ruining lives for a living."

"He's after Kayden Fuller, Sherlock. He wants her for something. I can't get her to tell me what Kayden represents to Charles Moriarty."

"She's the rightful heir to his fortune, well Ire-Jamie is, and as her daughter, Kayden Fuller would stand to inherit." Sherlock's tone was musing, she could hear him rubbing his beard and a quiet female voice in the background asking if she'd done something correctly.  That must be his new protégé, the one he'd been avoiding mentioning to her, but she'd heard he was there through a friend at Scotland Yard.

And that was what hurt the most, that he refused to acknowledge the voice in the background of their calls.  That Joan had to discover the girl's existence through a person she'd met only once or twice while in London with Sherlock.  That this had been going on for the entire time Joan had been in Geneva and he hadn’t mentioned her once, and it was only a passing question in an email not long after they’d been released by Malphrus that had clued Joan in to the extent of his lies of omission.

"Even without Moriarty dead... she would be the one to inherit.  Because of the whole criminal mastermind thing?"

"We should be careful, Watson, that seems to run in the family."  He paused and seemed thoughtful.  "Look, I'll try and get an appointment with Mr. Moriarty, tell him that I'm looking into the missing contents of his vault at Laramie Straus."

"Sherlock don't--"

"Why not?  We need the information."

" _We_ don't need anything, Sherlock.  You left, remember?  This is my case."

He sighed.  "I'm sorry."

"You're not."  Joan glared at a passerby with a small yappy dog that attempted to nip at her feet as it was walked by.  "You've got your new student and are off having a grand adventure with her."

"I'm not the one kanoodling with a murderer, Watson."

Joan's cheeks burned. "There is no kanoodling." The lie stung.  There could be.  She just had to say the word and she was sure it could escalate, despite Moriarty's utter disregard for her life.  "There is a mutual understanding that Kayden Fuller has to be protected from forces that wish her dead."

"Those two are not mutually exclusive."

"Just... let it be, okay?"  Joan let out a hissed breath of air.  "I don't want to have this argument right now."

"I am merely concerned for your safety."

"If you were that worried for me, Sherlock, you would be here, trying to chase her away from me.  You never would have left--" Frustrated at the sound of his preparing to interrupt her again, and embarrassed that she’d lost the fine edge of emotional control she’d kept for so long during their trained interactions since his departure to London, Joan ended the call and silenced her ringer, sitting back on the bench and fuming. 

A text appeared on the screen before she had time to shove it away into her pocket: _You left first._

 

She returned to the hotel hours later, her phone still silent but her mind made up.  She had to know the truth and she was not going to stop until she got it.  Moriarty was not going to hide behind a politely disinterested smile and charm any more.  She was not going to use Joan's fear of who she could be as a means to avoid full disclosure.  They were in this now, together.

Kayden Fuller's safety was their only priority. 

Moriarty had spread papers all over her bed and was sitting cross-legged in the middle of them.  Her feet were bare and her hair was down.  It fell over her shoulders, still kinked from where she'd put it up earlier.  It made her look so young. 

Joan took off her shoes and set her purse down on the desk.  Her phone now had three messages from Sherlock.  She ignored them. 

"I take it the conversation was not fruitful?"  Moriarty's tone was polite, but she didn’t bother to hide the fact that she was interested.  Joan bit back the urge to snap at her too. 

"It was productive," she lied.  She sucked in a deep breath of air and turned to face Moriarty.  Their eyes met and Joan felt the intensity of the morning all over again, and the bruises at her neck ached.  "We were interrupted before you could make good on your promise of apology."

"I'm not sure I'm the one you want an apology from, Joan."  Moriarty shifted a stack of papers to one side and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.  "Or is your current tiff with Sherlock unrelated to my... momentary loss of control?"

How she knew was in Joan’s body language, Joan knew. She didn’t bother to do much more than glare at Moriarty for assuming to be so familiar.  "Is that what you call attempting to choke the life out of me this morning?" Joan raised an eyebrow.

Moriarty said nothing for a long time, her eyes meeting Joan's in a silent war of attrition.  She had made her point and her feelings very clear to Joan, but her head dipped, bowed in defeat.  "Sit down, Joan. I need to book us a flight to Kansas." Joan opened her mouth to protest, but Moriarty's phone was already in her hands.  "After I will tell you everything."

 

 

 


	17. xvi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> major content warning for child abuse and suicide in this chapter.

_a memory --_

There were places in the house she wasn't allowed to go.  She still went to them, quietly, creeping in the shadows and along the disused servant's passages, but she was smart enough not to linger.  Her father would catch her at her exploring from time to time, belt in hand and mustache quivering with a barely concealed rage.

She learned to block him out.

The entire second floor of the east wing was off limits, reserved for her mother. She didn't venture there, even when the locked doors became nothing more than a passing moment of fascination with a bobby pin and pen knife. Locks were easy to open, if you had the right tools. It was not the lock that kept her away, it was the silence.

It rang out, aching, desperate, full of an agony that her scarce decade of years could not comprehend.  Silence so oppressive that it could swallow her whole, absorbed into a black pit and tumbling like Alice, down and down forever. A rabbit hole of despair.  They kept her mother there, behind a locked door that she was too stupid to learn how to open, raving, her mind half-gone and her body wrecked by what her husband had done to her.

Jamie's room was on the first floor, bathed in sun with a wide bank of windows that looked out over the grounds.  They were frosty now, caught in the January chill.  Her return to this empty place for Christmas was a formality, one she could not escape just yet.  Her father wanted her here as she gave him legitimacy, more than the shell of a woman rattling around in the east wing did at any rate.  He wanted her out of sight the rest of the time, locked away in this sunny bedroom, surrounded by the lies of this sham existence, which suited Jamie's purposes just fine.

She sat among pillows and stuffed bears and horses, a large book taken from the library in the dead of night propped up against her knees. It was a law textbook, a remnant of a grand uncle who spurned the Banks family fortune to work as a solicitor, out of date and full of the archaic language of the turn of the century.  She'd found it and its three other volumes hidden on one of the topmost shelves of her father's private collection, and had stolen the first, and then the second volume, an idea half formed in her mind.

If she could find a way, a plan to get them both out of this house and somewhere safe, her mother would start to heal. Hope was a childish emotion, and Jamie hated that she clung to it so desperately even when she knew by the time she was half-way through the first volume that the situation was hopeless.  She was a fool to trust a hope, to believe that this could get better.

Her mother would die up in the east wing, and she'd probably follow soon after.  Her father thought she hadn't noticed, but she saw more than he could ever dream. Their deaths were the only logical conclusion. 

Hidden in a shoebox under a loose floorboard under her bed was a collection of newspaper articles that she'd pulled from the bins at school and made copies of when her father was not around.  They were obituaries, mostly, members of her own family and people she'd never heard of save the triumphant, smug smile that flitted across her father's face as he read the paper at breakfast.  She saved them, each and every one, tracking the investigations into the 'suspicious deaths' and carefully clipping everything together with paperclips that had started to rust on some of the oldest collections of yellowing newsprint.

The papers were a part of a larger web, and she had stolen proof from her father's papers and guessed his briefcase combination twice before he'd figured out she was nicking and copying his paperwork.  She'd paid for that dearly, but he'd never found the copies she'd made.

Drip.

Jamie looked up sharply. Her bangs fell into her eyes and her lips twisted into a frown. Her ears strained to catch the sound.

Drip, drip.

Scrambling up onto her knees and crawling towards the end of the bed, Jamie caught sight of a wet spot in the ceiling.  Water had yellowed the ceiling over time, but now it just looked gray, damp with the water, drip, drip, dripping down.

Jamie got down off of the bed, taking the bin from beside her bed and setting it under where the water was coming down, and stole from the room.  The book lay forgotten on her bed, her fingers twisting around her bobby pin and pen knife in her pocket.  Upstairs was off-limits, upstairs was where her father kept her mother.

Someone had left the water running.

 The passage was off to the right, behind an alcove and tucked behind a nondescript door.  Jamie twisted into it, glancing around for her father and finding him nowhere in sight.  She had to be quick, had to be careful.  He was sure to blame her for this.

The passage twisted through the walls where Jamie and her father lived, its air dusty and reeking of musty disuse.  Jamie crept to the servant's stairs, her slippered feet left a trail of footsteps in the dust and she climbed the stairs slowly so as not to upset the settling wood.  They creaked under her feet, groaning loud, louder than she could bear.  She set her teeth and climbed on, hurrying now, getting to the second floor landing and jamming her bobby pin into the ancient lock.  Her breathing was calm and even, her hands steady as she buried her fear under good intent.  She had a task to complete, and afterwards, she'd go back to her book and her research, and try to find a solution to her unsolvable problem.

The east wing was silent, the kind of silence that rang in Jamie's ears and reminded her too acutely of a moment right before Christmas when she'd been standing her school's chapel at the dead of night, one hand in the collection plate and the other crossing herself to ward off the judgmental gaze of Christ on the crucifix.

She was not afraid.  Fear had left her the first time her father turned on her with that vindictive smile, folding his paper away and smugly informing her that the Banks family fortune was going to make him a rich man indeed.

"You're the heir," he'd told her.  "You are what gives me the right to this money."

Oh, how she hated him.

Her mother's bedroom door stood ajar.  Jamie crept towards it, her fingers tight around her bobby pin.  She could not shake the disquiet feeling of wrongness, this whole place felt wrong.  Like a tomb disturbed, the silence and the drip drip drip of the water enough to deafen her.

Something splashed underfoot, and wetness soaked through her slipper.  Jamie looked down, water pooled at her feet, flowing freely from the open door.  She pulled her foot back, and tugged off her slippers. 

The water was ice cold as she splashed forward, slippers in hand.  The hair on the back of her neck was standing up, and her heart was hammering in her chest.  Nothing about this felt right.  Her mother's rooms were usually bright and airy, but they were dark, shuttered against the weak winter sunlight. 

"Mother?" she called.  Her voice sounded small, lost against the rushing sound of the bath.  It had to be the bath, what else could it be?  "Mother are you alright?"

Jamie pushed the door open.

The tap was still running, her mother's head was sunk down in the water just to her chin.  Jamie hurried forward, turning the knobs off and reaching between her mother's legs to pull the plug from the drain. 

The water was red.  It stained the skin of her arm and her jumper sleeve.  Jamie turned then, saw the blood flowing freely from the cuts at her mother's arms.  She stared at it, fascinated by the way it looked, mixing with the water. 

Her arm was ice cold, water running in a bloody stream from her arm as she stood, plug in hand.  "Mother?" Her voice was small, the child forced to grow up too quickly.  A ringing filled Jamie's ears and her eyes stung with held back tears. "Mum?" 

There was no response. She was dead. He'd finally done it. Jamie hated him.

The only thing left to do now was scream.

And when help came, it was not to scoop her up and hold her close like the child she still was.  Her father stared at her for a long moment, arms wrapped around her knees at the window seat, staring out over the grounds so she would not have to see her mother's lifeless body in the bath.  She'd opened the window to see better, the biting north wind cut through her thin jumper like it wasn't there, but it reminded her that she was alive.

The drain gurgled and belched.  Her father's footsteps splashed with the water on the floor.  His hand touched her shoulder, gentle, and then firm. 

The world tilted.

She was falling, tumbling through empty air. The scream that wrenched itself from her lips was real this time. She landed in a rosebush, her body broken and the sobs real now. 

Above, her father's expression was a mask of triumph.


	18. xvii

Kitty Winter chewed on the back of her pen moodily and watched as her companion paced the room.  She was bored, exceptionally so, and he was very distracting to her boredom.  The problem was Sherlock’s preoccupation with something that was not their business.  They had other cases, her training, the small problem of how he was technically involved with an investigation that superseded his position at work and was assigned to an actual investigator, rather than a consultant.

“Sherlock,” Kitty said. She tried to interject firmness into her voice, a resolve she didn’t feel. Sherlock was being drawn into something that Kitty didn’t fully grasp, with the woman he’d left behind in New York, the woman who had him so low she wasn’t sure she could trust him. “What are we doing?”

He turned, his shoe scuffing against the floor. “ _We_ ,” his emphasis on the word was forceful. “Are not doing anything at all. We are patsies. We are being played for fools, caught in a conflict between two despicable people.”

She tilted her head to one said and sighed.  Her back was aching today. “You’re not making sense.” She didn’t know the full story here, she didn’t think she ever would. Sherlock was tight lipped, and Kitty was tight lipped right back. He saw her, he deduced her, but she would not give him details. Not yet, maybe not ever. 

Sherlock gave her a baleful look. Kitty wanted to withdraw into herself, her fingers curling around her notebook. He tossed a folder across the table towards her. “That is what we are up against.”

The folder contained a write up on a murder in Geneva, Switzerland. A man by the name of William Roscoe was dead, shot on a rainy night and left for the world to find him. Kitty flipped the first page over and found a second report, this one for a woman named Rodriguez.  “Two dead bodies in Switzerland? Sherlock, that’s hardly cause for alarm. People die every day.”

“It is when you know exactly who committed the murders.”

“Moriarty.” The name felt dull on her lips. “The mysterious woman with your Watson.”

“There’s no one else it could be.”

“But why would she kill them?”

“Why does anyone do anything, Kitty? They were no longer useful to her, they’d outlived their purpose, they betrayed her. I worry that fate is in Watson’s future as well.”

Kitty sucked in a sharp breath. Watson was important to Sherlock, but Kitty couldn’t quite discern why. She had left him behind; left him after something awful had happened back in New York. He was here, she was there, and they were, going off of how their correspondence had been of late, both still rather upset. 

She and Sherlock stared at each other for a long time before Sherlock’s shoulders sagged. He cracked one knuckle with his thumb and Kitty winced. He moved on to the next one, but the crack of bone was covered by his resumed discussion of their not-case. “Watson gave me a name. Edwin Van DeVeer, he was a cocaine kingpin in the Seventies and Eighties, but no one ever saw his face.  He disappeared right around the time another man came onto the scene: Charles Moriarty.” He exhaled, running a hand over his face.  “The father.”

“Bloody hell,” Kitty muttered. She exhaled, wondering what it would cost this Watson to divulge such a truth. Sherlock had been agitated since he first heard tell of Watson in Geneva. The company she was keeping was enough to send him into long sulks, brooding by the window, a single envelope of nice cream-colored stationary twisting around in his hands, never coming to a halt. The letter was from a woman named Adler, and she saw him with it often. “You think that this has something to do with him?”

Kitty did not want to meet Watson. She was not interested in knowing the woman who had hurt Sherlock so badly. He talked about her incessantly, and she felt like an old nemesis. Her involvement with the even more mysterious figure of Moriarty the younger was enough to make Kitty dislike her on principle.

“Watson certainly does.” Sherlock pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, clearly frustrated. “She says that Andrew Malphrus is taking orders from someone other than his usual bosses at Interpol, and that our information and the constant inquiries into the Laramie Straus case come from the same source: Moriarty’s father.”

 “And the heist itself?”

“Watson isn’t sure if that was the father or the daughter.” Sherlock stood by the window, his arms wrapped around himself. Kitty wanted to reach out and touch him, but she knew better. That was not how Sherlock did things. That was not how she did things.  They both carried their scars, collected and worn well. “Or, if she is, she will not divulge that fact until she knows that the girl is protected.”

Ah yes, the crux of the matter, a child was threatened. “Do you think that she’s holding back because of the kid?” Kitty blinked. “Sherlock, that…doesn’t really seem like the Watson you’ve described to me.”

He let out a great sigh. “I know, and that’s what concerns me – her loss of perspective.”

“This isn’t our case.” Kitty pointed out again. “If she’s lost her perspective, bully for her. If Moriarty the father is pulling all of these strings and pitting us and Andrew Malphrus against Watson and Moriarty then it should be up to Moriarty and Watson to figure it out. Let’s just focus on other cases, until such a time that Watson truly needs our help.”

Sherlock looked to his phone where it rested on the table and reached for it. Kitty watched as he typed in a message and sent it. She watched as he sent another, and then finally a third.

“Right then,” he said. “Let’s see if you can’t break into this apartment without my noticing.”


	19. xviii

_“_ _You're ripped at every edge but you're a masterpiece  
And now I'm tearing through the pages and the ink”_

It was a cool, crisp morning for late June. Joan was huddled in a borrowed sweater against the morning chill. She was exhausted, her entire body sagged feeling the weight of the past weeks. She was up half the night writing a detailed case report for Laramie Straus while Moriarty provided an irritating string of commentary on everything from Joan’s sentence structure to word choice.  She was worse than Sherlock. Joan was beyond frazzled.

The temperature was in the high fifties, but both of them were used to New York and the oppressive, humid heat that settled over the city like a wet blanket during the summer.  This was cold, almost autumn-like weather. The early morning wind off the lake was enough to cut through long sleeves and have Joan shiver, torn between cold and exhaustion.

Moriarty was cradling paper cup full of cheap coffee to her chin.  Steam rose before her, the curling halo of vapour making Moriarty look inhuman. “I noticed you never answered Sherlock.”

“No need, he told me he doesn’t want to be involved with this case anymore. Has other things he needs to work on.” Joan couldn’t quite manage to disguise the bitterness in her voice.

“Ah, the new protégé.” Moriarty hummed low at the back of her throat. “How does she make you feel, Joan?”

She was affecting nonchalance, but the remark was meant to cut Joan to her core. Moriarty’s gaze was almost kind as she twisted the knife of it into the raw, weeping wound that was the end of so many things between Joan and Sherlock. It made Joan’s teeth clench, wanting to lash out and force Moriarty’s face to shift into something recognizable. Something that didn’t feel so wrong. “Just peachy.” The lie stung. Joan was sure it was written all over her face.

Moriarty sipped her coffee. Joan glanced at her. She wasn’t quite pouting, but it was there: a hint of dejection that was confirmed when she next spoke. “It’s no fun if you don’t engage.”

Joan shrugged. “That’s exactly why I’m not.” Her every pore was exhausted and what she wanted was undefinable. The swelling warmth that came over Joan when Moriarty met her gaze alarmed her, and she looked away quickly. She couldn’t let Sherlock be right.

The creeping doubt set in again. Joan wrapped her arms around herself, the breeze had picked up, but she was not sure that it was the unseasonable chill that had her shivering.

Moriarty’s man slammed the trunk closed. Joan jumped, a little startled. She was not expecting the sound to cut through the quiet morning like a gunshot. She steadied herself, jamming her hands into her pockets. Her phone was there, another reminder that Sherlock had moved on. Something shifted within Joan, then, a deep, titanic movement of emotion within her. She closed her fingers tight around the phone. It did nothing to steady her. The ease at which Sherlock had let her go rattled about in her mind, gnawing at her senses and burrowing deep. She wanted-she wanted—she didn’t know what the hell she wanted.  She felt Moriarty’s fingers around her neck in that moment.

She felt Moriarty’s breath on her lips.

They were headed down that path, were they not? Two great forces set to collide and destroy each other?  _God_ , Joan thought.  _How can I—_

The how was easy, it feel into those inevitable aspects about herself that Joan tried so sincerely to ignore. The parts of her that liked the darkness. She relished the feeling of a man’s beating heart in her hands. Surgeons always had big egos, and there was something about the way that Moriarty looked at her that pulled that beast within Joan to the forefront. She turned it loose effortlessly and Joan could scarcely contain it even now, after weeks of practice.

On a deep exhale, Joan looked up to meet Moriarty’s icy gaze.  Her face was a mask of indulgence, sipping at her coffee. “There is something to be said for good coffee,” Moriarty mused. She slipped past Joan, close enough to touch, close enough to show all her cards, the smell of subtle perfume that Joan found appealing drifting in her wake.

“Doubt you’ll get much of that in Kansas.” Joan joked. She turned to follow Moriarty and stopped short. Moriarty was standing, her hands in her trench pockets, staring up at the windows that had belonged to their hotel room.  There was a contemplative air about her, staring up at that hotel room. “What?” Joan asked.

“Once, a little bird whispered a fascinating tidbit of information in my ear in that room. Once, I had my dearest enemy by her neck in that room.” Moriarty turned to look at Joan, a wicked, angry smile twisting across her face.  Joan took a step back, alarmed. “It’s sad to leave it.”

“I thought people like you had no time for the common sentimentalities of man.”

“Darling, everyone feels emotion. I felt elation in that room. I felt anger, annoyance, a veritable kaleidoscope of feelings. It’s a shame to leave a place that has made such an impression behind.” She paused, her expression softening. Moriarty’s eyes raked over the window and down to settle on Joan. Her eyes crinkled at the corners, and Joan felt hollow. “You’re in this now, you know. If you give that report to Laramie Straus you’ll be involved in a cover-up of a crime. An accessory after the fact. Damning stuff, Joan.”

“Is this really the best conversation to be having on the street?” Joan glanced around. The street was abandoned save herself, Moriarty, and the silent driver waiting by the car. Moriarty shrugged.

Upstairs, a member of the housekeeping staff had opened the window to what had once been their room. The white curtain drifted out, caught on the cold breeze. It was like the truth, aired so visibly. Joan didn’t like it. She was so used to speaking in coded phrases, nimbly dancing around subjects without ever applying fact to reality. To speak so openly, without the hesitance that came with not wanting to admit the truth, was a struggle for Joan. The words stuck in her throat, sandpaper-like and acrid. “You killed two of your people while we were here. You murdered them in cold blood knowing that everyone from Interpol to Cantonal Police were trying to pin this on you. You did it for what? For a bunch of worthless paper?”

Moriarty turned and regarded Joan. Her face was devoid of any emotion at all. “If you think that’s all this has been about you haven’t been paying attention.”

It was about the girl. It was about Moriarty’s bastard father. Joan  _knew_  this, but she did not want to admit it. She didn’t want to admit that there were noble intensions in this twisted web.  Exhaling deeply, Joan looked down at her feet for a moment to steady herself before raising her gaze to meet Moriarty’s blank face. “And the fact that this heist puts all the secrets you gave away and then some back into your hands?”

A wide, congratulatory grin erupted across Moriarty’s face.  She stepped forward, taking Joan’s hand.  “Now, my dear Joan, you’re finally _getting_  it.” Her smile fell slightly when Joan did not return one of her own. How could she, when the truth was so biting at her conscience? “I did not anticipate Roscoe running to my father, you must believe that Joan. The girl – my  _father -_ ” she spat the word, “– they were never meant to be a part of this. The game has changed now.” Moriarty gestured towards the car. “Shall we?”

All her instincts were screaming at her to turn away, to walk away from the car and the truth that was staring her so clearly in the face. Moriarty was a liar. She’d always been a liar. This all was to get back at her father. That’s all it could ever be, but the pieces didn’t fit. The game wasn’t right. Joan saw through them so easily, but this one clouded her mind – masking her ability to see the truth in Moriarty’s lies. “Has it really?” she asked. “The way I see it, this is just an added bonus. Your father sounds like an absolute bastard, but we could just walk away. He has  _nothing_  on the girl. You’ve given me assurance after assurance, Jamie. We could just leave. Turn in the paperwork and leave. Go back to New York and pretend like none of this ever happened.”

“Do you think he’ll stop? He’s a hound to the scent now, far more terrible than you could ever possibly imagine, Joan. He knows she’s out there, he knows that so long as she lives – as I live – that he’ll never be free of my mother’s legacy.”

“And what legacy is that?”

“My dear Joan, we all have our demons. I am his. The only person alive who could bring him to his knees.”

The wind whipped across the empty street. Joan shivered. “If something were to happen to you, would she be safe?”

Moriarty closed her eyes, exhaling slowly. “That is why we must get going. Our flight to Chicago leaves soon. You will see the truth in this matter, I swear to you.” When she opened her eyes, they were a clear, resolute blue. Joan swallowed and met Moriarty’s gaze with the same intensity.

The shift was complete. Joan could not say no to Moriarty. She could not walk away from this truth that she was so close to fully understanding. Moriarty’s father would kill Kayden Fuller if given half the chance. Joan couldn’t let that happen. She turned and got into the car, the driver held the door open, waiting silent as a statue for her. Moriarty clambered in after her.

“We’re in this together.” Their legs were touching. Joan made no move to shift away.

Moriarty nodded. “For better or for worse.”

 

Mr. Perrin’s round face fell as Joan walked into Laramie Straus. He took quick stock of her: eyebrows climbing up his brow as she explained to him that the investigation, at least for the time being, was concluded. It was a lie, of course, but one creased with the age and ease of use. Sherlock had taught Joan how to lie about the end of an investigation in order to see what involved parties would do next. He always said she was better at it than him. “Men trust women simply because they are too arrogant to see women as a threat,” he’d told her once.  Joan had scoffed at the sentiment, but she understood his point.

“Are you continuing your investigation?” Perrin smoothed down his tie, sitting behind his impressive desk.  Joan sat opposite, passing over her case notes in their crisp brown envelope. “You’ve failed to recover anything from the missing vaults. Which – let me remind you Ms. Watson – we did employ you to do.”

Joan folded her hands in her lap, her face schooled carefully impassive. She did not like Perrin. He was too smug and too self-assured. The kind of man that her mother would set her up with thinking that he was ‘just your type Joanie.’

“The investigation has stalled, Mr. Perrin. I need to return to the United States to sort out some Visa issues.” Another lie said with the same ill-fitting smile. Joan felt dirty. “I don’t want our friends at Interpol to start investigating me.”

Perrin laughed, his cheeks jiggling. “You’ve done nothing to draw attention to yourself, Ms. Watson. Very professional, if I do say so myself, even if your choice of company…”He trailed off, his expression distant. Joan waited, counting the beats of silence.  She wanted to speak, but the words were stuck in her throat. The urge to defend Moriarty, even when Joan knew her to be all that she was, was almost overwhelming.  Perrin could not know. His knowledge would be their downfall. Seeming to gather himself, or perhaps not quite as immune to Joan’s deathly stare as he thought he was, Perrin straightened.  “Well, regardless. I must thank you for your time. I am hoping that you will make every effort to recover what has gone missing going forward.” He extended his hand, his smile tugging at his cheeks. 

Reaching over the desk, Joan took his hand. His palm was sweaty. The case notes were between them, but they would do nothing to implicate a thief. William Roscoe, convenient though he was, was not the end game of this heist. “That is my goal, Mr. Perrin,” Joan answered. She moved to draw her hand away, but Perrin’s grip grew more intense.  She did not flinch, but raised her eyes slowly to meet his gaze.

“Listen to me, Ms. Watson,” Perrin hissed. He glanced nervously over to the security camera in the corner above the door leading back out of his office and the safe confines of Moriarty’s hired car.  Joan felt a momentary swell of panic, but held her ground. Perrin’s voice dropped lower still. “You are playing a dangerous game, walking such a narrow line. You need to tread lightly, for I cannot call off these dogs. It is not just Interpol now, but secrets. Secrets that are still in play.” He glanced meaningfully down at the packet. “I know what was done.”

“Then you know that there’s nothing I can do to recover the information while still here.” Joan swallowed, her throat was dry and the words felt choked. There were layers upon layers to this war between father and daughter.

“Please,” Perrin said. “Get them back for me.”

Joan smiled weakly. “I’ll try.”

He let her hand go and got awkwardly to his feet. “I wish you a safe journey, Ms. Watson.”

“Thank you for all your assistance,” Joan answered. She crossed to the door in slow measured steps, waiting to hear the distant call of an alarm, a siren. The alarm in a place like Laramie Straus would be silent. She’d never hear them coming. Crossing the threshold of Perrin’s office, and then out into the lobby, Joan’s breath came quicker. She couldn’t run, she couldn’t give the impression that she was afraid. If they saw her fear they’d pounce.

Her footsteps echoed on the polished floor. Joan counted her steps, ten to the first door, two to the second. She pushed it open and glanced behind her. Perrin was standing in the doorway to his office, leaning on the doorframe.  He raised his hand, as if in parting, before holding up a photograph.  Squinting, Joan struggled to see what it was, she wanted to turn back, to get a better look.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Joan glanced down and pulled it out. It was an email from Perrin. She hurried down the steps towards Moriarty’s waiting car, her phone loaded the picture slowly. It was blurry at first, as Joan sat down next to Moriarty, but it came further into focus.

It was an image of a child’s back, cut up and bloodied. Her arms were skinny, held out and balled into tiny fists. Her back was marbled with bruises and blood. A sprig of holly was halfway embedded in the skin, just below her shoulder blade.  Below there were other scars, and familiar moles and freckles.

Joan turned, the door closing behind her, to see Moriarty’s face, catlike and smiling. She glanced down at the phone in Joan’s lap and the smile fell away. “He knows then.” She sighed, reaching into Joan’s lap and plucking the phone from where Joan had dropped it.  “That does complicate things.”

All Joan could was the heartbeat. Slow and steady, a drum pounding in her ears.

“We’d best be going then.” Moriarty said.

 

The ride to the airport was silent, as was their wait to go through customs. Joan held her breath as her passport, and then Moriarty’s, were scanned. There was no notice, nothing, just a stamp and a polite smile from the customs officer, thanking them for coming to Switzerland. They waited in an airport bar, the conversation stale and stilted. They couldn’t talk about things here.

The flight itself was not full. Moriarty had booked them business class. Joan dozed, her mind full of worry and questions.

She hadn’t told Sherlock she was leaving. Would he even care?

 

“The wind isn’t with us.”

Joan looked up, caught in the between sleep and dream.  She blinked, and rubbed at the corner of her mouth. Her neck ached. Moriarty was leaning against the window, her eyes trained on the sea of clouds illuminated by a brilliant, full moon overhead.  “What?”

“The wind isn’t with us, you can hear it in the engines.” Moriarty pulled the window shade down and sat back in her seat, her eyes half closed. “It’ll increase our flying time by a few minutes.”

“Not enough to miss our connection, I’d hope.” The last thing she wanted was Moriarty getting it into her head to road trip from Chicago down to Kansas. Joan wasn’t sure she could spend that long in a car.

“No, but just enough to make the engine hum too loud to allow for sleep.” Moriarty rubbed at her temples.

Joan reached for her purse and rooted around, finding a half-empty bottle of pills and passing them wordlessly over to Moriarty. “For the headache,” she said. Moriarty’s smile was thin-lipped, her eyes narrow and accusatory. Joan swallowed. “Don’t look at me like that, it’s just Advil.” A little snort of laughter left Moriarty’s lips. Joan frowned. “What?”

“I just never expected you to care, Joan.” Moriarty pressed two pills to her lips and swallowed them dry. She handed Joan back the pill bottle.

It was not that Joan wanted to care, so much as the underlying need to take advantage of this sleepy business class cabin and get a straight answer out of Moriarty about what was waiting for them once they landed. Moriarty embraced the dramatic, but Joan was not sure the reveal would be worth it. She sat back, her eyes half closed. “I have to care,” she said. “We’re in this together now.”

Moriarty hummed at the back of her throat. “I suppose that would be the case.” She shifted, leaning forward, into Joan’s personal space. She smelled of canned airplane air and a hint of the wine she’d had earlier – the root cause of her headache. “Shall I tell you then, why we are doing this?”

Joan said nothing. Her silence was her agreement.

Sucking in a deep breath, Moriarty curled her fingers around Joan’s wrist. Her hand was warm, almost too warm to Joan’s cool body. “I told you that my father killed my mother. I saw it happen.” Moriarty turned Joan’s wrist over, exposing a smooth plane of skin.  She trailed her nails along Joan’s ulnar. Back and forth. “He threw me out a window that day. I’m sure you’ve seen the scars. That’s what Perrin’s got a photograph of.” Moriarty sat back, her eyes closed. She didn’t let go of Joan’s wrist.  “I landed in a bush, probably the only reason I didn’t die. It would have saved my father, and I suppose Perrin, all this trouble now, don’t you think?”

Shrugging, Joan reached for the blanket the airline had provided her and pulled it over her legs. It was a cover, her skin was as warm as Moriarty’s now. The shiver that ran through her was something else entirely. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. She wasn’t a very good mother.” Moriarty’s grip tightened. Joan bit back an admonishment. She couldn’t get involved in the twisted recesses of Moriarty’s psyche. “I want to end him. I’ve wanted to for years. First I had to be dead, so I did that, disappeared with the crumbling towers.”

“You kept his name.” Joan said. She remembered that Tuesday all too well, but the ensuing chaos was a perfect time to disappear. “One might think you would throw that away too, just to ensure that you carried no marks of him.”

“Darling, how quickly you forget. Moriarty, before you and Sherlock got too close, was a ghost. No one knew who I was. I did not deal directly with but a handful of my people. And Sherlock, I suppose.” The protest at the tip of her tongue, Joan grit her teeth to keep herself from speaking. That was not the argument she wanted to have right now. Moriarty knew it, too, Joan could see the self-satisfied smugness in the way curled her lips around Sherlock’s name. She wouldn’t engage. This was Moriarty trying to get out of telling Joan the truth, and Joan was not going to give the satisfaction of a tangent. “And then you happened, my dear, dear Watson. You came into my world like a hurricane and ruined all my plans. And oh! What lofty plans they were.” Moriarty glanced at Joan. Her eyes were dark, pupils blown with some emotion Joan was not quite ready to understand. “My empire was amassing funds, I was buying back my birthright in slow increments, all above board. He’s had to keep his nose clean of late, can’t gather funds as he used to. I wanted to buy it all back, to strip him of all but his title before I killed him.”

“Are you still going to do that?”

“He’s rather forced my hand.”

“Killing him isn’t the answer. Why not expose him? Show the whole world how awful he is?”

Moriarty smiled slowly, all teeth. “Where’s the fun in that, Joan?”


End file.
